5 Days to Power E-Book

Rob Wilson

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 409

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

A remarkable and important account of the negotiations that led to the birth of the Coalition.

Das E-Book 5 Days to Power wird angeboten von Biteback Publishing und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

5 Days to Power

The Journey to Coalition Britain

Rob Wilson

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

Biteback Publishing Ltd

Westminster Tower

3 Albert Embankment

London

SE1 7SP

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Copyright © Rob Wilson 2010

Rob Wilson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the publisher’s prior permission in writing.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-1-84954-081-0

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Set in Adobe Garamond by Soapbox

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX

For all my Wilsons – Jane, Joseph, Elizabeth, Fern and Megan

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

Preparations

Day 1: Friday 7 May

Day 2: Saturday 8 May

Day 3: Sunday 9 May

Day 4: Monday 10 May

Day 5: Tuesday 11 May

Postscript

Acknowledgements

It has been an enormous pleasure and privilege to write this book, which would not have been completed on time without the kindness and help of others. I am indebted to my wife and children, who tolerated me writing much of this book on my summer holidays and continued to be excited about its publication every step of the way. I also owe thanks to my mother-in-law, Patricia Pozzi, for letting me use her office and beautiful new Apple Mac to tap away on.

I am also deeply indebted to all those who agreed to be interviewed for the book and there were many of them, nearly sixty in total. There are some interviewees, including MPs and senior aides from across the political spectrum, who would doubtless rather remain anonymous but nonetheless have my sincere thanks.

I would especially like to thank the following for giving their time so generously, as many agreed to see me twice and also to check and recheck factual information: David Cameron, Nick Clegg, William Hague, George Osborne, Andrew Adonis, Ed Balls, David Laws, Chris Huhne, Andrew Stunell and Danny Alexander. All were in the thick of the action as it unfolded and were able to give impressive recollections of incidents that took place.

Thanks should also be given to the many transcribers of interviews for their painstaking and accurate work and to friends and colleagues who have read draft passages and sections of the book.

Biteback Publishing and Iain Dale heard by chance that I was writing this book and rang me out of the blue to ask if they could publish it. I would have been waiting until May 2011 to publish were it not for their entrepreneurial creativity. They have been a pleasure to work with.

Preface

What took place over the five days after the 2010 United Kingdom general election, from Friday 7 May to Tuesday 11 May, was a simple and raw fight for the ultimate prize in political power that the country can bestow: the office of Prime Minister.

David Cameron and Gordon Brown were to be locked by the electorate into a fight for power that would ultimately depend on the calculations and personal affections of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. Unlike perhaps more Machiavellian contests for power elsewhere in Europe over the centuries, this was to be a very British power struggle. It was played out, in public at least, according to bureaucratic rules set out by the Civil Service, but also with respect for the ancient British traditions of decency and fair play.

Few, however, would have been in any doubt: Gordon Brown and David Cameron were both determined to do whatever was necessary to secure the position of Prime Minister for the next five years and return their party to power, and the process became a quite brutal examination of their individual political skill, emotional intelligence, physical stamina and resourcefulness.

For all the party leaders the ‘five days to power’ would prove a stiff test of their character and of their parties’ core beliefs. Regardless of the long-term success of the government which ensued, the outcome has set the scene for the politics of a generation.

Introduction

The forging of a coalition government in May 2010 was a momentous event in British political life. Few of the electorate actively sought a coalition government. Many indeed believed that such a government would be weak, unstable and incapable of dealing with the country’s massive economic problems. The Conservative campaign had played on the fear that a hung parliament (that is, a parliament in which no single party holds an overall majority of seats) would be destabilising and damaging for the country, partly as a way of targeting the Liberal Democrat vote.

But once a hung parliament had materialised, and produced a coalition government made up of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, was naturally keen for it to be seen as a significant moment in modern history. The Conservative–Liberal Democrat government represented nothing less, he proclaimed, than ‘an historic and seismic shift’ in British politics.

The sort of behind-the-scenes horse-trading and compromise which is routine in so many countries in Europe and beyond had simply not been a feature of post-war British politics. Single-party majority government – Conservative or Labour – had become the assumed ‘British way’. Even during an election campaign in which all the polls united in shouting ‘hung parliament’, the Conservative Party leader gave little attention to the idea of a coalition, as opposed to a minority government of one hue or the other.

There had of course been a torrent of rhetoric during the general election campaign about ‘new politics.’ The country appeared to be yearning for a different style of politics and promises were made to the cameras by all party leaders to end the murky cronyism and bed-feathering that the public felt had been luridly exposed during the parliamentary expenses scandal. This episode, more than any other in recent history, saw the standing of MPs and the whole Westminster system sink to new depths in the public estimation.

As leader of a third party, Nick Clegg in particular was anxious to press his claim to represent a politics that was fresh and different, detached from the creaking established system. And as his star ascended after the first of the televised leader debates, both Gordon Brown and David Cameron enhanced their own rhetoric calling for a new kind of politics. They assured the electorate that they too, after all the scandals of New Labour and MPs’ expenses, yearned for a new way of doing things.

Many were cynical. The electorate had heard plenty of talk of ‘new politics’ before – not least when Tony Blair swept to power in 1997 – and all too often the reality had failed to match the expectation. But as it turned out, the election of 2010 truly did produce something surprising and new. Few could have imagined quite how quickly a ‘new politics’ – in terms of the nature of the government, if not necessarily of its moral purity – would arrive.

Commentators frantically dug out their history books. Many – particularly those who chose to be sceptical about the coalition’s prospects – reached straight for the famous remark by Benjamin Disraeli: ‘England does not love coalitions.’ Some quoted him further: ‘Coalitions, although successful, have always found this, that their triumph has been brief.’

Sober historians were equally quick to point out that what Disraeli was talking about was short-term tactical alliances, not coalitions in the modern sense of a binding together of parties in government. More importantly, they noted, for much of English parliamentary history in the age of democracy, whether England loved coalitions or not, it certainly got them. Between 1885 and 1945 governments by more than one party were the norm and single-party government was the exception. In this fifty-year period, majority single-party government ruled for only ten years.

Some of these coalitions were ‘national governments’ in times of war, or great national crisis, but by no means all were. And the new government of 2010, of course, was quick to emphasise the critical budgetary situation which it faced and which had made the forging of a strong combination government so critical.

At one level, of course, coalition is simply a basic political fact. Just as evolution is written, if one knows where to look, in the bones and body structures of species now alive, so modern parties contain in their basic anatomy the vestigial shapes of once independent political groups. In the case of the ‘Lib Dems’, the conjunction of words says it all: the party was born as a coalition, between the Liberals and the Social Democrats. And the Conservatives have thrived in the past by absorbing once distinct groupings, such as the Liberal Unionists of Joseph Chamberlain. This fact has been the source of much anxiety for modern Liberal Democrats such as Charles Kennedy and Menzies Campbell, alarmed by the lessons of the ‘history book’ in terms of the grave dangers of partnership with the Tories.

At another level, of course, all parties are coalitions. Few could doubt that David Cameron and Nick Clegg have more in common with each other, politically speaking, than either does with the more extreme wings of his own party (to the right in Cameron’s case, to the left in Clegg’s). While in recent years the leadership of all three parties has scrapped over the middle ground, their MPs and party memberships fan over a broader spectrum.

But for all that coalition and compromise is a basic fact of political life, it remains the case that the events of May 2010 were truly remarkable in recent British history. Since the end of the Second World War, Britain has been a country of almost unbroken single-party government. Before 2010, every general election bar one has returned either Labour or the Conservatives to office with an overall majority (even if on three occasions that majority was measured precariously in single figures, and on two of those occasions it evaporated during the term after defections or by-election defeats). For over sixty years now the political culture of this country has been that elections are a ‘winner-takes-all’ tussle between the fighter in the red corner and the fighter in the blue corner – and preferably decided by a knock-out.

Nor was David Cameron wrong to assume that even without a majority, the outcome would be a single-party minority government. In the only post-war election to fail to return a majority – that of February 1974 – this is how it was done (albeit briefly). Such a surprise was this particular result that the Queen’s presence in the country had not been assured: she was on her way back from a trip to Australia. The widespread confusion as to basic procedure which followed served to intensify the general fear in Britain of any election result which was ‘inconclusive’. Hence the general anxiety – which must have puzzled many watching on the Continent – to have matters resolved within a few days, for fear first that the markets would take fright, and second that the population at large would react angrily to a perceived failure of the political class.

There is no doubt that those involved in negotiating the coalition behind the scenes felt the pressure of this unfamiliar national event. (Some seemed to regard it even as a ‘national crisis’.) The way in which our politicians responded, and the way the deal was done – as well as the alternative arrangements which were explored – is a story that deserves to be told.

Access to key figures involved from all three political parties enables me to tell it in a manner and a depth in which it has not been told before. It enables me to shed further light and answer questions to which even the negotiators themselves would have dearly loved to know the answers. Which concessions were genuinely necessary to persuade the other party to agree to a full coalition? What was Labour offering in its desperate bid to stay in power? Could it have delivered it? What was said in the one-to-one meetings between the party leaders? What contact and preparation between the parties occurred before and during the general election? Were the different parties as straight-talking and honest with each other as they affected to be? Why did the Conservatives decide to offer a referendum on the Alternative Vote? When was the Liberal Democrat decision to do the deal with the Conservatives actually taken?

Naturally this book does have opinions, but it is not an attempt to write a Conservative account of what happened, nor to apportion criticism or blame to the various participants, their parties or their leaders. Wherever it was practical in explaining events, I have left readers to draw their own conclusions. Its main intention is to document faithfully and historically what happened, so as to provide a contemporary map of history in the making: the order things happened, the meetings, conversations, the documents and first-hand memories of the key participants.

The account in the following pages is based on almost sixty interviews with key players in the hung parliament negotiations, including Cabinet ministers past and present, MPs, peers and aides. Where the source of a quotation is not otherwise explained in the text, the quotation is taken from these interviews. The memory undoubtedly can play tricks, and participants’ recollections of events are sometimes hazy. I have tried, as far as possible, to cross-reference participants’ accounts of events.

If this book is accessible, interesting and readable to a wide audience and adds to the knowledge of what happened in those critical five days in British political history, it will have achieved its purpose.

Preparations

There have been a number of theories about whether ‘backroom deals’ were done between the parties before the general election of May 2010 took place. Perhaps no leader-to-leader contact, because that would have been too obvious and difficult to deny, say the conspiracy theorists, but many believe that there was detailed backstairs contact, discussion and preparation between the parties.

To some extent, of course, the lesson of history might have been taken to be: Don’t bother! Hung parliaments have been very rare things in post-war British politics and coalitions entirely absent. Even on those occasions when just such a situation looked highly likely, ultimately the outcome was different.

For example, in 1992, when a hung parliament seemed assured and extensive preparation was undertaken, the parties’ efforts turned out to be wasted as the electorate’s fears about Neil Kinnock entering Downing Street crystallised, allowing the pollsters to be confounded and Conservatives to be returned with a surprise majority of 21 seats.

In 1997, work had gone into a possible new alliance between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. But the public handed New Labour a crushing majority, beyond what Tony Blair had dared contemplate, and one which made any thought of a formal coalition with the Liberal Democrats unnecessary. Thereafter the prospect of a coalition receded in the Blair era as it became clear that Labour would continue to win comfortable majorities, which is what happened in the 2001 and 2005 general elections. As these recent elections demonstrate, second-guessing the electorate can be presumptuous, and therefore fraught with difficulty.

Nevertheless, since November 2009 the opinion polls had begun to suggest the likelihood of a hung parliament, a likelihood which by 2010 had become unambiguous. The major parties began subtly to shift their election preparations. This meant that at the same time as members of each party pored over their rivals’ policy documents and manifestos for areas of disagreement which they could target during the election campaign, they simultaneously studied them for areas of agreement which might help cement an allegiance if circumstances dictated.

Simply to say ‘Let’s prepare for a hung parliament’ is of course to take no account of the almost endless range of slightly but critically different situations which might arise, given even minor variations in the electoral figures. And sure enough, as even those who had planned most assiduously would discover, elections find a way to spin things, to impart a subtle but significant twist, that none had anticipated.

Yet with the polls suggesting a hung parliament, it would have been a surprise if the political parties had failed to draw up detailed strategies to act as reference points.

Labour preparations – or lack of …

Gordon Brown, it would appear, had made very little effort to prepare any groundwork. Before 1997 Tony Blair had taken great pains to woo the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown, listening to his concerns, making promises and dedicating the time required to make him believe a real process of change was under way. Having seen John Major with a small majority (then minority) government become almost a prisoner of the Conservative Party right wing, Blair wanted the option of a coalition as insurance against being reliant on his party’s left wing. Brown had no such approach.

Yet Lord Andrew Adonis, the former Liberal Democrat who became a key adviser to Tony Blair and served as Secretary of State for Transport in the Brown government, believes that Brown had set out to woo the Liberal Democrats at the very beginning of his premiership. He cites the advisory positions given to Liberal Democrats in June 2007, directly after Brown became Prime Minister, and the offer of the job of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to Paddy Ashdown.

Likewise Adonis draws attention to a speech Brown made about constitutional reform which was ‘a big opening to the Lib Dems. So the opening to the Lib Dems goes right back to the beginning of the Brown premiership.’ He also points to the fact that the Labour Party had a firm policy of holding a referendum on the Alternative Vote system, which would deliver at least a version of the electoral reform which the Liberal Democrats had long craved. Labour had tried to introduce such a referendum before the election and had put it in their manifesto.

There were existing close contacts between some junior members of the Labour Cabinet and Liberal Democrats, who were committed to voting reform. John Denham, Ben Bradshaw and Peter Hain were pro-electoral reform and known to have close links with senior Liberal Democrats – both inside and outside their ‘shadow Cabinet’.

Jack Straw, who as Justice Secretary was responsible for the Constitutional Reform Bill that was debated in early 2010, also argues that a combination of the likelihood of a hung parliament and Labour’s previous commitments made them reach out to the Liberal Democrats. But he is willing to recognise that there was a question mark over the extent to which the Labour Party genuinely wanted electoral reform or could deliver it, having talked about it for so long without action: ‘There was a feeling we needed to show greater delivery on the issue of voting reform because we were being mocked for the fact that there had been a pledge for a referendum on the voting system in the ’97 election manifesto.’

Like Adonis, Straw believes that Brown was genuinely committed to constitutional change and attributes the lack of progress to his focus on the 2008–9 financial crisis, which had consumed all of Brown’s energy and attention. And as the Liberal Democrats were well aware, this was coupled with the internal problem that the Labour Party was utterly divided on the issue of electoral reform. The party could not be relied upon to vote in support of it, which meant that to deliver a solution it needed the Prime Minister’s direct attention, and he was either not willing or not able to give it.

By late 2009 the polls consistently showed Labour in trouble, and a feeling developed that the party and government needed to be more imaginative and construct a better offer at the election. Crucially in the minds of those around Brown, it was believed that the party needed to reach out in a distinctive way to liberally-minded voters. It was part of a strategy to firm up the soft left vote, those who had drifted from Labour due to the Iraq War and as a result of concerns about civil liberties.

It would be true to say that there was extreme nervousness about voting reform within the government, and discussions about it at Cabinet Committees and in Cabinet were not without serious reservations and argument. But by late 2009 the proposal had gone through, despite some heated debate at a Parliamentary Labour Party meeting. The compromise settled upon was that backbenchers would agree to vote a bill for a referendum through the House of Commons but would not then be under any party obligation to support a public ‘Yes’ vote in a referendum campaign itself.

The Labour leadership managed to get a proposal for a referendum on the Alternative Vote through the House of Commons before the election, although it was ultimately blocked by the Conservative Party in the House of Lords in the ‘wash up’ at the end of the parliament. The Conservative Party opposed a referendum on AV (at the time) partly as a matter of principle, but also because it would cost £100 million – an expense which Dominic Grieve, then shadow Justice Secretary, argued could not be justified when there was little evidence that the public generally cared about it as an issue.

So it did not make it to law, but Labour did then include the policy in its election manifesto. Brown sought to emphasise the common ground in an interview with theIndependentduring the election campaign. ‘A new politics demands a new House of Commons and new House of Lords. The Conservatives are against a new politics,’ Brown told the paper on 21 April 2010. ‘There is some common ground on the constitutional issues. It is up to the Liberals [sic] to respond.’

Despite the efforts of the Brown government, none of the key Liberal Democrats saw these activities as representing a deep commitment to political reform. During the campaign, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg dismissed AV as ‘a baby step in the right direction – only because nothing can be worse than the status quo. If we want to change British politics once and for all, we have got to have a quite simple system in which everyone’s votes count. We think AV-plus is a feasible way to proceed. At least it is proportional – and it retains a constituency link.’

Clegg felt Labour’s offer was insufficient to attract his party’s support: ‘The Labour Party assumes that changes to the electoral system are like crumbs for the Liberal Democrats from the Labour table,’ he told the Independent on 22 April. ‘I am not going to settle for a miserable little compromise thrashed out by the Labour Party.’ Brown personally, Clegg had declared to the Daily Telegraph the previous day, was ‘a desperate politician’ who had ‘systematically blocked, and personally blocked, political reform’.

As David Laws has since recalled: ‘Gordon Brown came in and missed the opportunity to develop the agenda; he didn’t really reach out to the Liberal Democrats because we saw essentially ten years that were a missed opportunity. Brown did become convinced of the need for a centre-left realignment based on electoral reform, but it was literally at one minute past midnight, when the election was lost – it was simply too late.’

The Liberal Democrats could not have been clearer that they wanted much more from Labour on electoral reform. In the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill on 19 January 2010, the Liberal Democrats put down an amendment which would have changed the voting system for elections to the House of Commons to the Single Transferable Vote. This was surely a clue to Brown and the Labour Party about what any negotiations in a hung parliament should be about.

Brown’s relations with the Liberal Democrats

Previous experience of coalitions or partnership between parties in mainland British politics has demonstrated the crucial importance of the personal chemistry between the party leaders.

In December 1916, following the resignation of Prime Minister and Liberal Party leader Herbert Asquith, Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law was invited by King George V to form a government and become Prime Minister. However, he deferred to Lloyd George, whom he liked and trusted in a way that perhaps would not be possible in politics today. He had served in Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, as Chancellor and Leader of the House of Commons. The huge mutual trust between the two leaders and the way their personalities complemented one another made for an extraordinary political partnership. Their partnership at the top of government saw their coalition re-elected by a landslide following the Armistice.

The respective personalities and easy relationship between James Callaghan and David Steel greatly facilitated the formation of the Lib-Lab pact in the late 1970s, and the continued existence of the pact owed much to the determination of the two leaders to keep it going.

The creation of the Joint Cabinet Committee, in which Liberal Democrats formed part of the Blair government’s Cabinet Committee on constitutional issues, was the product of the close personal relationship between Tony Blair, Paddy Ashdown and Roy Jenkins. In Scotland, the level of trust between Donald Dewar and Jim Wallace has been described as the ‘rock’ on which the Labour–Liberal Democrat coalition was built in 1999.

Despite his repeated claims that ‘I agree with Nick’ in the party leaders’ televised debates during the campaign, Brown had no relationship to speak of with Nick Clegg; quite the reverse. Those around the Prime Minister suggest Brown didn’t care for the Liberal Democrat leader much, seeing him as ‘a privileged public school boy whose politics were largely Tory’. He was dismissive of his intellect and disliked what he saw as his constant opportunism. The times when they did meet in private as party leaders, Brown found it difficult to control his legendary temper and indeed, on occasions, did not.

In one instance, in the run-up to the general election, Brown was keen to come to an agreement with other party leaders over MPs’ expenses. He could see it was damaging both politics generally and – to the extent that a sitting government was likely to come off worst from this sort of scandal – his own re-election prospects.

At the height of the scandal, in an effort to put a lid on an affair that was damaging all parties and the reputation of all politicians, in April 2009 the three party leaders took part in a meeting at the House of Commons, attended also by each party’s Chief Whip. Brown had proposals to replace MPs’ second home allowance with an allowance based on daily attendance, and it was an occasion where there was both an obvious need and a genuine opportunity for effective cross-party collaboration.

But the meeting was anything but constructive and the leaders failed to reach agreement. On this issue (as also on others) Brown found Clegg ‘unhelpful, obstructive, holier-than-thou’ and resented his, as he saw it, public grandstanding over a scandal in which none of them had any business casting the first stone.

In general, as one very senior Liberal Democrat who went on to serve in the Cabinet recalled, ‘Gordon didn’t like Nick, didn’t relate to him. There was a bit of old-fashioned class stuff involved and Gordon was someone whom you needed to show respect to, not just the office he held, him personally. There was a way of dealing with him but I don’t think Nick ever got to that level.’

Unable to contain his annoyance, Brown let rip at his younger rival in a quite extraordinary way. A bad-tempered row erupted, with a number of intemperate contributions. Clegg described Brown’s proposals at one stage as ‘barking mad’ and demanded to know what the point of having a meeting was when Brown wanted only to lecture them about his proposals rather than discussing the reservations or ideas of anyone else present. One of those in the meeting was sufficiently enraged to describe Brown as ‘an obnoxious bastard’. In general, Clegg felt, Brown’s attitude to his party was one of maddening condescension: he had ‘a demeanour towards the Liberal Democrats that if only we just grew up and wised up we would fall under Labour’s wing.’

These reports are perhaps unfair to Brown, as Clegg and Cameron no doubt played their part in this meeting breaking down with such acrimony and recrimination. But whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, the key thing was that the Liberal Democrat and Conservative leaders came away with a clear and shared sense that Brown was difficult to work with, to say the least. In Cameron’s opinion they formed then, as well as on other occasions when they worked together (over the Gurkha controversy, for example), a mutual sense of the other as reasonable and straight-dealing.

This early awareness that each could collaborate with and trust the other – at the same time as they both found the Prime Minister infuriating – would be more important than either could then have guessed.

Rather in the manner of Edward Heath before him, Brown had failed to establish a meaningful long-term relationship with the Liberal leader before political circumstances forced them into coalition discussions. Although Brown would have been well advised to have been courting Clegg, he never really tried – until it was too late. Instead there was an atmosphere where the two leaders clearly didn’t care for each other and barely spoke to one another. Unwisely, the Prime Minister instead preferred to work around Clegg – maintaining links with his party via back channels. Andrew Adonis, himself a former Liberal Democrat, advised the Prime Minister and kept his own contacts warm.

It would, however, be wrong to put all the difficulties of creating a solid platform for Labour to negotiate with the Liberal Democrats simply down to Gordon Brown’s relationship with Nick Clegg or the party’s concerns about electoral reform. There was also deep-seated dislike of the Liberal Democrats within the Labour Party that reached the highest levels.

One Labour member of the Cabinet said: ‘I would much rather have done a deal with David Cameron than I would with Clegg. I’ve always had a problem with the Liberal Democrats, you largely know where you stand with the Tory and Labour brands, but with the Liberals what they say not only differs constituency to constituency, but ward to ward, street to street and house to house. They are scavengers.’ Another said: ‘The problem with Nick, and the Tories have reason to know this, is that he resorts to some of the lowest politics imaginable.’ Many members of the Labour Party would have been deeply unhappy about any deal, and not just because of the parliamentary arithmetic. It was simply that they had experienced Liberal Democrat campaigning methods, and found that they stuck very firmly in the throat.

Gordon Brown felt that his personal friendships would bear fruit. He was close to former Lib Dem leader Menzies Campbell, for example – a friendship born in Scotland. Like leaders David Steel and Charles Kennedy before him, Campbell came from an environment in which alliance with the Tories was unthinkable. In the smaller political village north of the border, Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs had shared friendships as well as political common ground. Campbell had been extremely close to the former Labour leader John Smith, and became friendly in turn with Smith’s protégé Gordon Brown. On one of Smith’s hill-walking trips, the two peeled off the main group and strode down the mountain together for four hours. In their background and their outlook they found much in common. An ongoing friendship with Brown gave Campbell a perspective different from some of his party colleagues who had little love for the Labour Prime Minister.

The other friendship the Prime Minister had cultivated was with Vince Cable, the Lib Dem spokesman on economic matters. It was not a close friendship, but they ‘got on reasonably well’, trusted each other, and met at frequent intervals to discuss events, particularly the economic crisis. The meetings became supplemented by phone calls, Brown increasingly seeing Cable as an intermediary with his party. During the economic crisis through 2008 and 2009, for example, Brown was keen that the Liberal Democrats supported the Government position against the Conservatives.

Andrew Adonis was later to describe this Labour negotiating strategy to the BBC: ‘It’s like a patchwork quilt where all of us were seeking to create this great quilt but all of us were working on different bits at different times and then trying to sew the whole thing together.’ Friendships with former senior members of the Liberal Democrats were all well and good, but none had sufficient influence on the current leadership. A patchwork quilt of back-channel negotiators was never likely to end up sewn together.

Indeed, so far as the Liberal Democrat leadership was concerned, it only added to the frustration at Labour’s tactics to know that they were attempting to go behind their back, to pull strings and to influence party grandees. This method of operation by Brown and his team caused tensions and resentment.

Peter Mandelson has said of his party’s preparations: ‘You may be surprised given that this was the opening gambit of a negotiation for the future of a coalition government but no, we didn’t have a document, a paper, an agreement, a negotiating position. I mean we were flying blind in that sense.’

One member of Labour’s Cabinet blames Mandelson, at least in part, for the lack of preparation and the failure of Labour during the general election campaign to get its message across. ‘Peter spent far too much of his time screening contact with Gordon rather than getting on with the job,’ he said.

Whatever the reason, in May 2010 the Labour team was under-prepared. In advance of formal negotiations beginning on Monday evening following the general election, it was the Liberal Democrats who supplied the document around which the discussions were based.

Ed Balls’ experience of Labour’s preparations for a hung parliament, or lack of them, is perhaps the most instructive. The first that Balls, one of Brown’s closest and most long-standing allies, heard of the fact that a Labour negotiating team would hold talks with the Liberal Democrats – and that he was part of the team – was when Brown called him late on Saturday morning, with the meeting due at 3pm. It was only on the drive down to London from Yorkshire that Balls found out who else was in the negotiating team and then he spoke to Adonis, Mandelson and Brown about the meeting on his mobile phone. The pre-meeting briefing with Mandelson consisted of a conversation as Balls bought a cup of tea in Portcullis House and the pair walked to the lifts to get to the third-floor meeting room. This lack of any formal preparation towards staying in power was frankly astonishing.

Gordon Brown’s character

Brown’s character flaws were at the heart of the failure of his government, the failure of his general election campaign and the failure of his negotiations over the five-day period described in this book. I was present in the Commons when Tony Blair famously described Brown as ‘a clunking fist’ and the picture painted immediately resonated across the chamber – a phrase that was superficially a compliment but which was, in its underlying suggestion and message, anything but.

Mandelson’s description of Brown as a ‘snowplough’ was also apt. Brown was a man whose political style involved assuming a posture and resolutely maintaining it against all opposition; certainly not a man with the sinewy guile to fashion a way forward in a coalition situation.

Brown’s verdict of himself was somewhat at odds with these descriptions, he saw himself more as a romantic hero – he once, to general bemusement, drew the parallel with Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff. One could certainly characterise Brown’s view of himself as akin to the romanticism of the medieval knights – with the characteristics of strength, boldness, courage, passion and fighting for others, but heavily armoured and carrying a big sword.

Of course, many around Brown saw him very differently, with little to admire. He was difficult, touchy, even prickly, insensitive and unable to make even the most basic of decisions. A number of his former Cabinet ministers volunteered privately that they didn’t like him.

Unfortunately for Brown, politics, like warfare, moves on quickly. The new politics wasn’t about the old heavily armoured medieval knights, but the young, lightly armoured, fast-moving generals with a rapier thrust. Cameron was a hard target for a heavy sword or a clunking fist, and Brown therefore was always unable to deliver a fatal blow.

However, had he been able to forge any form of personal rapport or relationship with Clegg, Brown may have been able to extend his longevity.

The Liberal Democrats

Paddy Ashdown wrote in his autobiography A Fortunate Life that every leader of Britain’s ‘liberal third force will, if they are successful, sooner or later have to face the dilemma of choosing between purity and power’. The circumstances and the choices would always be different but ‘in the end’, Ashdown concluded, ‘the consequences of success in growing the party and its support are that th[e] hand [dealt to the party leader by the British political system] must eventually be played and cannot be avoided’.

Not only had the political circumstances changed a great deal since Ashdown was leader, but the Liberal Democrats themselves had changed significantly. The election of Nick Clegg as the Liberal Democrats’ latest leader in December 2007 marked the ascendancy of a new generation within the party. More pragmatic and market-friendly than idealistic activists, talented and ambitious politicians such as Clegg, David Laws, Chris Huhne and Danny Alexander were driven by – as James Crabtree put it in Prospect magazine in July 2010 – ‘the need for change, frustration with their current leadership, and a hunger for power’.

As Menzies Campbell told me, this new generation were ‘very professional … they had made enormous sacrifices to get in [to Parliament], they had not come in to forever sign Early Day Motions – they had come in with a clear feeling that they wanted to make progress and they wanted to make government progress.’

Many of the new generation of Lib Dems – including Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne, Ed Davey, Mark Oaten and Vince Cable (though most did not immediately associate Cable with this group) – had contributed to The Orange Book, edited by David Laws and Paul Marshall and published in 2004, which presented a collection of essays proclaiming that the new political outlook was more pragmatic, less misty-eyed and more market-friendly than that of either the ‘bearded civil libertarians’ of common stereotype or the left-wing refugees that had turned to the party out of dissatisfaction with Tony Blair and New Labour.

Crucially, in the eyes of one elder statesman, the ‘young turks’ appeared to have a more ‘open-minded’ attitude to the Conservatives (perhaps as a consequence of spending their parliamentary careers in opposition to a Labour government), rather than the ‘visceral antipathy’ of previous generations of Liberal Democrats.

When in November 2009 the Observer reported an Ipsos MORI opinion poll showing the Conservative lead down to six points, down from twenty points six months earlier and the lowest figure in any poll since Gordon Brown was being hailed for his handling of the economic crisis, Danny Alexander, Clegg’s 37-year-old chief of staff (and a first-term MP), wrote in the Observer on 23 November that the Liberal Democrats were now having to ‘look very closely and seriously’ at what would happen if they became the ‘kingmakers’ in the event of a hung parliament.

However, the party’s preparations for a hung parliament were little advanced by this point. A combination of successive Labour landslide election victories, followed by polls consistently giving the Conservatives a clear lead since the autumn of 2007, led the party to take the prospect of a hung parliament somewhat less seriously than in the run-up to the general elections of the 1990s. The high turnover rate of the Liberal Democrat leadership in recent years had not helped matters either: planning exercises that had taken place under Sir Menzies Campbell, including an ‘away day’ at the Henley Business School and even contact with Buckingham Palace, do not seem to have been taken forward under Clegg. One senior Liberal Democrat observed that the frequent changes of leadership inevitably affected the ‘corporate memory’ at the centre of the party.

In late 2009, Clegg had quietly selected four MPs to prepare for, and act as the party’s official negotiators in the event of a hung parliament. Sensitive to the inferences that would be drawn about the party’s positioning in a hung parliament, the existence of the group largely remained a secret. The first that one Liberal Democrat front-bench spokesman knew of the composition of his party’s negotiating team in 2010 was on the morning of the Saturday after polling day.

The chosen MPs were Danny Alexander, Chris Huhne, David Laws and Andrew Stunell. Alexander was leading work on the party’s manifesto, which was deliberately developed in co-ordination with the work of the negotiation group. Huhne, a former leadership candidate, had negotiating experience from his career in the City, as did David Laws.

Laws, the party’s former Director of Policy, also had direct experience of parliamentary coalition negotiations. When Paddy Ashdown had been leader of the Liberal Democrats, he had sent Laws north to negotiate the first coalition in Scotland. It had given Laws an early understanding of the intricacies and challenges of building a coalition government, leading one witness to the negotiations to describe him as the Liberal Democrats’ ‘star negotiator’ during the post-election period.

The group was completed by Andrew Stunell, a former Chief Whip of the Parliamentary Party and a vastly experienced negotiator at local government level. The appointment of Stunell was to be popular within the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party, and Danny Alexander believes that Stunell played an ‘absolutely crucial role in developing the negotiating role because he had an awful lot of experience’. Stunell had written a book entitled In the Balance on hung councils and how to handle the meetings and plan out your negotiating strategy, ‘where you hang tough and where you give in, how they should be handled’. Alexander considers this to have been ‘absolutely invaluable’ to the preparations.

There were notable absences from the Liberal Democrat team. Although Stunell was a reassuring presence to many in the party (at least in part because he was not seen as close to Clegg) and Huhne had appealed to the party’s left during his bid for the leadership, none of the prominent figures from the left were included in the negotiating team. More significant was the absence of Vince Cable.

Cable’s absence from the eventual hung parliament negotiations (although he was a member of Clegg’s ‘reference group’, to which the negotiating team reported and which met to advise the party leader on key strategic decisions both before the general election and in its immediate aftermath), came as a surprise even to members of the Liberal Democrats’ own ‘shadow Cabinet’, and mystified both the Conservatives and Labour.

The Conservative negotiating team assumed after the first meeting with their Liberal Democrat counterparts that Cable’s absence from the negotiations meant that he was simultaneously conducting a separate formal negotiating channel with Labour.

On the Labour side, this would lead to a more serious misunderstanding. With the Liberal Democrat ‘shadow Chancellor’ not part of the negotiating team, there was also no Labour Chancellor, Alistair Darling, in their team. Darling’s absence may well have been due to Cable’s absence, but could equally be because he did not believe his party should hang on to power. Labour’s assumption was that when it came to the finer details of the negotiations, such as costings and spending commitments, there would need to be separate bilateral economic negotiations between Cable and Darling. The two parties apparently never reached an understanding on this point of procedure, with Labour’s unwillingness to agree to spending commitments in Darling’s absence proving a major source of frustration to the Liberal Democrats.

While Clegg had appointed his main negotiating team in the Autumn of 2009, the negotiators’ discussions about the party’s strategy in a hung parliament did not get going in earnest until February. As might have been expected of the party for whom a hung parliament constituted the best hope of political influence and even government, the Liberal Democrats began to prepare extremely thoroughly.

A series of meetings followed with papers tabled and minutes taken. This preparation took place, however, away from the main party life at Westminster and was not publicised among party members. The ‘shadow Cabinet’ and wider Parliamentary Party were not included or consulted about either the appointments or the wider discussions that took place.

The papers and minutes of meetings demonstrate a level of professionalism and thoroughness that isn’t normally associated with, for example, Liberal Democrat policy-making. While these documents do not necessarily give a detailed blow-by-blow account of what was argued by each of those present, a clear picture does emerge of the party’s thinking and planning before the election result was known.

Senior Liberal Democrat MPs knew that in the event of a hung parliament, the eyes of the nation would be focused on their actions. The party had long worried about the public’s perception of its fitness to govern at the national level (the so-called ‘credibility gap’). Senior figures knew that such judgements by the public would be made on the basis of the speed and clarity of its decision-making in the hours and days after polling day.

More perhaps than either of the other parties, the Liberal Democrats were conscious that they would suffer in the popular estimation from a messy and protracted negotiating process. There was also another consideration: a drawn-out or acrimonious period of uncertainty might be damaging to the cause of electoral reform which was so dear to Liberal Democrat hearts. Opponents of proportional representation would undoubtedly point to this as an example of the sort of prolonged and chaotic bartering behind closed doors which inevitably went with PR as a system.

However, by the time they held the first of a series of secret meetings in the House of Commons, Clegg had already set out the party’s ‘public line’ on its approach to a hung parliament. When a hung parliament had first emerged as a serious prospect the previous November, Clegg had told the Andrew Marr programme on BBC television that ‘whichever party has got the strongest mandate from the British people will have the first right to seek to govern’. This could be ‘either on its own or with others’.

Amid growing media speculation early in the New Year, on 5 January 2010 Clegg wrote an article forThe Timesin which he ruled out any ‘backroom deals or under-the-counter “understandings” with either of the other two parties’. Clegg repeated the party’s mantra that the party with the ‘strongest mandate’ should have the ‘moral right’ to govern, although he did not clarify what he meant by ‘strongest mandate’.

Since Clegg had opened up the possibility of working with either of the two main parties in a hung parliament, the principal dilemma facing the negotiators was how to deal with a situation in which the Conservatives were clearly the largest party in a hung parliament. In an e-mail circulated to the other three negotiators prior to the second meeting on 24 February 2010, David Laws presciently envisaged a ‘very early offer of co-operation or coalition’ from the Conservatives in the event of a hung parliament, or even if the Conservatives had a small majority.

The offer would be based around ‘the importance of economic stability and addressing the budget deficit’; ‘the importance of calming financial markets’; ‘shared policy aspirations’, including reform of politics, education, the environment; fiscal oversight and civil liberties; and ‘the importance of working beyond party boundaries’. However, the purpose of such an offer, Laws reckoned, would be at least in part a cynical attempt to make Cameron’s Conservatives appear ‘inclusive and constructive’ while wrong-footing the Liberal Democrats into appearing ‘divided, indecisive and partisan’. He concluded that it was ‘incredibly important’ that the party responded in a ‘swift and professional’ way.

The negotiating group’s initial instinct was to let the Conservatives form a minority government. While the party would offer some support and adopt a generally constructive approach to a Conservative minority government (in order to avoid an early second election and a major squeeze on its vote), it would remain at arm’s length (to steer clear of guilt by association for the unpopular decisions that the government would have to take). Laws’s initial suggestion had been for some sort of agreement from opposition with the aim of securing a ‘second election after a period of time, at an appropriate moment, without being blamed for the breakdown’.