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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
When David Cameron and Nick Clegg stepped out into the rose garden at No. 10 to launch the first coalition government since the Second World War, it was amid a sea of uncertainty. Some doubted whether the coalition could survive a full term - or even a full year. Five years later, this bold departure for British politics had weathered storms, spending cuts and military strikes, rows, referendums and riots. In this compelling insider account, David Laws lays bare the inner workings of the coalition government from its birth in 2010 to its demise in 2015. As one of the chief Lib Dem negotiators, Laws had a front-row seat from the very beginning of the parliament. Holding key posts in the heart of government, he was there for the triumphs, the tantrums and the tactical manoeuvrings. Now, he brings this experience to bear, revealing how crucial decisions were made, uncovering the often explosive divisions between and within the coalition parties, and candidly exploring the personalities and positions of the leading players on both sides of the government. Honest, insightful and at times shocking, Coalition shines a powerful light on perhaps the most fascinating political partnership of modern times.
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COALITION
The Inside Story of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition Government
DAVID LAWS
For James
‘The Prince who walks away from power walks away from the power to do good.’
—NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am extremely grateful to all those who have assisted me in writing this book over the nine months since the May 2015 general election.
I would particularly like to thank Nick Clegg, who kindly allowed me to access some of his own private papers and records to check facts. Thanks, too, to Phil Reilly, whose hard work made these records more accessible and easier to navigate.
I would also like to thank others who gave their time and advice, including Danny Alexander, Tim Colbourne, Ed Davey, Will de Peyer, Lynne Featherstone, Olly Grender, Stephen Lotinga, James McGrory, Christian Moon, Jonny Oates, Matt Sanders, Chris Saunders and Katie Waring. Of course, all errors, omissions and opinions are my responsibility alone.
I would like to record my sincere thanks to the brilliant Claire Margetts, whose hard work over the past four years has helped me to keep my own detailed accounts of the period of coalition government. It would have been very difficult to write this account without drawing on those records.
The extraordinary opportunity I had in government to observe and to participate in the events which are described in this book would not have been possible without the support of many people in my constituency and beyond. I will always be grateful to the kind, generous and supportive people of Yeovil constituency, who returned me as their Member of Parliament from 2001 to 2015. Being MP for the Yeovil constituency was the greatest privilege of my life, and I look back only with pride and pleasure on my time in that role.
I am extremely grateful to my superb Yeovil office staff of Sue Weeks, Claire Margetts, Sarah Frapple, Sadye McLean and all our loyal volunteers. Thanks also to Alec Newton and to all those who worked so hard in my office in London over the past fourteen years. I am grateful to Theo Whitaker, Graham Westrop, Khloe Obazee, and all those who gave their time during the 2015 general election campaign. Cathy Bakewell and Sam Crabb were my election agents during four general elections in Yeovil; their patience, dedication and wisdom are much appreciated and were critical to our success.
The early part of the 2010 parliament was a very difficult time for me personally, and I would not have remained an MP or returned to government without the marvellous and unconditional support of Olly Grender, Cathy Bakewell, Joan Raikes, Paddy and Jane Ashdown, Nick Clegg, Sam Crabb, the late and wonderful Pauline Booth, Jo and Martin Roundell Greene, John Dyke and – of course – James and my mother. To these few people, and to the many others not named here, I will always be particularly grateful.
Working in the coalition government was a fantastic opportunity to put principles into practice. I was supported impressively by my civil service private office teams, whose dedication and professionalism made me conscious of how much we should appreciate our civil service and its fine traditions of political impartiality and high standards. I enjoyed working with Sir Jeremy Heywood and his team in the Cabinet Office, as well as the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education, Chris Wormald, and his colleagues.
In the Cabinet Office, I had the pleasure to work with Jonathan Crisp, Nick Donlevy, Katie Harrison, Suzanne Kochanowski and Natalie Perera, who staffed my private office for varying periods. In the Department for Education, my excellent and utterly dedicated team was variously composed of Wilhelmina Blankson, Lydia Bradley, Philip Cattle, Samuel Cook, Laura De Silva, Tom Dyer, Becci Fagan, Camilla Frappell, Samuel Kelly, the formidable Georgina Manley and Ursula Ritz (who both brilliantly managed my packed diary by frightening me and many others into keeping to time) and Daniel Sellman. My four irreplaceable policy advisers were Tim Leunig, Chris Paterson, Matt Sanders and Julian Astle. They contributed hugely to all we achieved and prevented me from making many errors.
I am also grateful to the dedicated policy team based in the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office, who gave both Nick and me high-quality and rigorous advice.
In this book, I describe in detail my working relationships with senior colleagues in the coalition government. All relationships have their good and bad patches. In fact, the moments of tension and difficulty were relatively rare, and it was a great pleasure and honour to work with most of those referred to in these pages.
If there are few real ‘villains’ in my account, it is because in my experience most politicians in all of the political parties are decent, hard-working people. So, my particular thanks to those in both coalition parties whom I worked most closely with: Danny Alexander, Vince Cable, Nick Clegg, Nick Gibb, Michael Gove, Jonathan Hill, Jeremy Hunt, Norman Lamb, Oliver Letwin, Nicky Morgan, John Nash, George Osborne and Liz Truss. And my apologies for anything you find in here which you would rather had stayed secret!
Finally, I am grateful to the team at Biteback Publishing for their work on this volume, and in particular to the patient and extremely efficient Olivia Beattie, and the irrepressible Iain Dale, who encouraged me to tell the tale that follows.
DAVID LAWS
Kennington
January 2016
INTRODUCTION
This is the inside story of the Liberal Democrat–Conservative coalition government of 2010–15. It is the first detailed and extensive account by one of those who served in this government.
I was one of a small number of MPs and advisers who helped negotiate the coalition between the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives in May 2010. I attended the first Cabinet meeting, on Thursday 13 May 2010, and I was there at the last Cabinet meeting, at 9.45 a.m. on Tuesday 24 March 2015. Only fifteen other ministers were present on both occasions.
In writing this account, I have drawn on my own records of my time in government. I have also been able to access some of the records and recollections of my close colleagues. This has allowed me to produce a detailed account of the government and its work.
Where I put conversations in quotation marks, it is generally because I was present to hear exactly what was said. Where I was not present, I have usually sought to summarise the reported conversations, unless I have highly reliable accounts of particular exchanges to draw on. Of course, in both cases it is impossible to vouch for every word spoken, but I am confident that I have provided a fair and accurate account.
In telling the story of the coalition, I have sought to be as open and revealing as possible. But I have obviously had to respect the rules about the privacy of certain government information, not least where national security is concerned. I have also had to weigh carefully where revealing sensitive information about individuals, or repeating conversations held in the expectation of privacy, might be considered unreasonable or discourteous. I have held back much from my account which might fall into these categories – but generally only where these details are not fundamentally important to the story I am telling.
I do not, however, pretend that this account is exhaustive or that it allocates to each area of the government’s work a fair, measured and proportionate amount of space. Inevitably, this book reflects my own sense of what was important in the government’s work and the areas that I was involved in. However, the roles I held in government – Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Minister of State in the Cabinet Office, and Minister of State for Schools – gave me a very good vantage point to assess the most important areas of the coalition’s work.
It must also be understood that as a Liberal Democrat member of the government, I was in a better place to view the internal workings of the Liberal Democrat side of the coalition, and my account draws very much on this particular perspective.
I decided to write this book now for three reasons. Firstly, I think it is important that historic narratives of periods such as this should be written, and in this era of intensive media coverage and freedom of information it seems unnecessary to wait for twenty or thirty years before the true story can be told.
Secondly, I think there are some important lessons for my own party and others to consider following the period of coalition. This account seeks to be honest and self-critical in order that the right conclusions can be drawn for the future. And many of the issues described in this book are still relevant to the major political challenges that we face today, so that I hope my story may assist people in understanding these challenges and drawing the right conclusions.
Finally, I am very proud of what the Liberal Democrats achieved in the coalition. I want this book to stand as a record of some of the great progress I believe we secured, as well an honest account of our mistakes.
Having written this account, and reviewed the story I had to tell, two risks were evident to me which I should draw to the reader’s attention. Firstly, when looking back over a five-year period of government in which so many different challenges and issues arose, it is inevitable that what catches the eye of any author are the dramas, conflicts and controversies. I record many of these in the pages which follow. The inevitable risk is that the reader may conclude that coalition was one long process of dispute and strife – whereas, in fact, the 2010–15 government was, on the majority of issues, very much united, and successfully pursued an ambitious programme of social and economic reform. There were few issues on which the coalition parties divided in the House of Commons, and there were similarly few issues on which the coalition was defeated – as least in the elected chamber. What this account seeks to do, however, is to pull back the curtain behind this generally united front, to show how decisions were made and why.
The second cautionary note is about individuals, and the impression of them which may be formed by references and quotations from particular events over a five-year period in government. It is possible to perfectly accurately record what someone has said at any point in time, while simultaneously creating an overall impression of the individual which may prove partial or inaccurate. We all at times say things which, taken out of context, can create a distorted impression of who we are and what we stand for. For this reason I have taken the opportunity towards the end of the book to offer a more rounded evaluation of a few of the most important characters in this narrative. In politics, as in life, individuals are rarely always right or always wrong, and their characters can be far more complex than much one-dimensional reporting allows for. I hope that the portraits I have created are fair to politicians in both coalition parties.
I have sought to write an account that is balanced, rounded and fair. But, of course, I do not claim to be a neutral and impartial observer of events. I helped to create the coalition and was a strong supporter of this government and of my party leader and friend Nick Clegg for five years. On 7 May 2015, the Liberal Democrats received a brutal judgement from the electorate on our period in office, losing all but eight of our fifty-six seats in the House of Commons. I have never believed in questioning or second guessing the decision of the referee. But I hope that in a small way this book will help to contribute to a fair evaluation of the service of my party, the Liberal Democrats, to the people of our country.
AN EXIT POLL
MAY 2015
On the evening of Wednesday 6 May 2015, Nick Clegg had completed the final leg of his election campaign tour. The Liberal Democrat leader’s final sweep through the UK had started at sunrise in the far south-west of England, at Lands’s End, on the previous day and it had now finished in the far north of Scotland, at John O’ Groats.
Now, on Wednesday night, Nick Clegg was travelling back to his constituency in Sheffield, in a tiny plane, accompanied only by his senior press spokesman – the laddish, sharp-tongued cheeky chappy James McGrory.
The small plane was making its way south through a ferocious storm, and was being pitched around in the black sky. ‘Don’t worry,’ said the pilot, ‘this plane is thirty years old, and it hasn’t come down yet!’ Nick Clegg didn’t feel particularly reassured. James McGrory dropped off to sleep.
Sitting in his seat, and reflecting back on the exhausting six-week election campaign, the Liberal Democrat leader felt that it had gone as well as could be expected. His performance in the election debates had been well received, and he felt that the campaign was much better managed and organised than in 2010.
By late evening, the Deputy Prime Minister was safely home in Sheffield with his wife, Miriam, preparing for the final day of the election.
Much further to the south, in my house in the village of South Petherton, just a few miles from Yeovil in Somerset, I was making my preparations for the last day of our local campaign. I was also looking through for the last time the briefing papers that our Liberal Democrat team had prepared in the event that there was a hung parliament.
I was one of a small team of four MPs and one peer who had been selected a year earlier by Nick Clegg to form our negotiating team for any potential coalition talks. While Danny Alexander was the chair of this group, he was widely expected to lose his seat. And on Sunday 3 May, Nick, Danny and I had met in south London and we had agreed that I would take over the leadership of our negotiating committee in the event that Danny was no longer an MP on 8 May.
Preparations complete, I was in bed by midnight and fell instantly to sleep.
Next morning, my alarm woke me at 4.30 a.m. and by 5.30 I was meeting a group of young Liberal Democrat activists in the streets of south Yeovil. We were gathering early so we could put out a final election-morning leaflet in this key part of the constituency.
For any candidate, the last day of an election is simultaneously nerve-racking and quite soothing. All the hard work is done and you know that the end is finally in sight. But you also know that just a few votes could be critically important, so you have to work right to close of polls at 10 p.m.
The Liberal Democrats held fifty-six seats in the House of Commons. My own private calculations showed that on a bad night we could be left with as few as twenty, and on a good night it could be as high as thirty. So twenty-five parliamentary seats for the Liberal Democrats was my central prediction – and I fully expected my own constituency of Yeovil to be one of those we held, albeit with a very much reduced majority.
The morning was cloudy, with very light rain. We had finished putting out our leaflets by around 7 a.m. and we passed one of our local councillors, Bridget Dollard, heading off to man the local polling station.
Throughout the day, as always on election days, we called our voters to encourage them to cast their votes. The reception we received was generally positive, but there was one early sign that caused me concern. My superb and experienced election agent, Sam Crabb, reported that in one part of Yeovil – the parish of Brympton – the turnout was unusually high. Indeed, he said that there were queues at the polling stations before 9 a.m. – unheard of in this part of Yeovil. Brympton was a key Lib Dem/Conservative battleground, where a lot of floating voters lived. What was galvanising voters to turn out in such areas so early, I wondered. That night we would find out the answer.
My day started in Rowan Way, with hard-working activists such as Emma Dunn and Kris Castle. It ended in Westland Road – a ‘heartland’ Liberal Democrat area, just outside the gates of the famous helicopter factory, where our vote seemed to me to be as strong as ever. Knowing that the next twenty-four hours were likely to be very busy, and almost certainly without opportunities to sleep, I finished my ‘knocking up’ of Lib Dem voters at 8.30 p.m., and I was back home in South Petherton by 9 p.m. – just one hour before polls closed in one of the closest general elections in fifty years.
In Sheffield, Nick Clegg had also spent the day out door-knocking, in the more affluent parts of his seat, seeking to win over former Conservative voters in what was now a Lib Dem/Labour marginal seat. He was home in the early evening and made his final preparations for what was bound to be a whirlwind forty-eight hours.
In South Petherton, I packed my bags into my car, with all the material that I would need in the event of hung parliament negotiations. The national election result still seemed highly uncertain, but a hung parliament was regarded as a high probability and I expected to go straight from my count in Yeovil to Whitehall – possibly using as a first base my ministerial office in the Cabinet Office, at 70 Whitehall.
But before 70 Whitehall, it so happened that I was off to 4 Whitehall. 4 Whitehall, South Petherton, was the home of the unassuming, hard-working, mild-mannered, but formidable Joan Raikes, the chairman of my local constituency party and a loyal and long-standing supporter of mine and of Paddy Ashdown, my predecessor as Yeovil MP.
By tradition, Joan hosted a dinner for the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate on general election night – to keep our minds off the count taking place just a few miles away. I arrived at Joan’s at around 9.50 p.m. – just in time to settle down to dinner before the BBC exit poll was released. Joan switched the television to BBC1 and served up dinner – lamb casserole. The countdown to 10 p.m. began, and at that moment Joan got up from the table to get some drinks from the kitchen.
And then it was 10 p.m. The BBC election night music played, sending tingles down my spine. And suddenly there was David Dimbleby with the BBC exit poll result. I held my breath and leaned forward:
We are saying the Conservatives are the largest party. Here are the figures which we have. Quite remarkable this exit poll. The Conservatives on 316, that’s up 9 since the last election in 2010. Ed Miliband, for Labour, 77 behind him at 239, down 19. If that is the story, it is quite a sensational story.
It might be sensational, but my focus was no longer on the balance between the Conservative and Labour results. What on the earth was the Liberal Democrat projected seats total? I rose to my feet and squinted at the television screen, over on the other side of the room. My heart sank. Alongside the forecast number of Conservative and Labour seats was the Liberal Democrat figure: ten. If that was true, there would be no coalition. And, more seriously, most of our parliamentary party had just been wiped out.
The projected seats total was spectacularly lower than almost anyone had previously forecast.
Of course, it was ‘only an exit poll’, and on television Paddy Ashdown was saying that he would eat his hat if the number was proved right. But we had been through all this in 2010, when the exit poll had projected far fewer seats than we had expected. We had thought the exit poll must be wrong in 2010, but it turned out to be almost exactly right.
I was immediately convinced that the figure of ten Liberal Democrat seats was going to be about right. Not only was this a disaster for my party, but it also meant I could not even take for granted my own constituency in Yeovil. Indeed, I immediately recalled a recent conversation with Ryan Coetzee, our chief election strategist, in our London HQ when I asked for their analysis of the canvassing and polling figures for Yeovil. ‘They look all right,’ I was told. ‘But to be honest, we are not focusing much on your seat. If we don’t win Yeovil, we’d only have about ten seats left anyway.’
I texted Sam Crabb, who was already at the count in Yeovil. ‘You seem to be ahead on the postal votes,’ he texted back, ‘but it is close. Maybe 43 per cent to 37 per cent.’ I was temporarily cheered – this was about the margin of victory overall that I had expected.
Over the previous few days, I had pressed Nick Clegg to fix a telephone conference call for soon after the exit poll results, so that we could talk about the implications of the likely result. The conference call was due shortly. Meanwhile, Joan and I ate large bowls of chocolate ice cream for temporary cheer.
I dialled in to our conference call at 10.30 p.m. We could no longer rely on ‘Switch’, the 10 Downing Street switchboard, which fixed up these conference calls in government, since we were now in political mode, not government mode. On the call when I joined it were Jonny Oates, Nick’s chief of staff; Danny Alexander; Stephen Lotinga, Nick’s press chief; and Ryan Coetzee, chief election strategist. Paddy Ashdown, the general election chairman, was still on the BBC, trying his best to play down the exit poll.
While we waited for Nick to come on the call, Ryan said, ‘This poll has just got to be wrong, hasn’t it?’ He asked me how things were going in Yeovil, and whether we thought we had lost. I cautiously reported back the early, positive, signs from the count. Then, at around 10.35, Nick joined the call.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘This exit poll is pretty shocking, but I just don’t know if we can take it seriously. Apparently there is some other exit poll out which is much better for us. We could talk for ages now about what we might do, but until we know if this exit poll is right, I just don’t see that we can have an intelligent conversation. Anyway, if this poll is right, then frankly we are totally stuffed, and there isn’t much for us to talk about or decide.’
It was therefore agreed that we would end the call and talk again at around 2 a.m., when the results would be much more certain. I had been very clear with my agent that I wanted no communication from him until the result could be reliably gauged. Even when I am winning easily, I cannot stand having a running commentary on my re-election chances.
But on this occasion I was simply too nervous to wait. I texted Sam again and asked what the result was looking like.
‘I’m afraid it’s not good,’ was the reply. ‘The ballots that have been cast on the day are just massively against us. There seems to have been a big swing to the Tories since the postal votes.’
‘Am I going to lose?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I am afraid so,’ was the reply.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
I told Joan. Then I rang my mother to warn her.
Then I phoned Nick Clegg. ‘Nick, I am sorry to tell you, but I have lost Yeovil. This must confirm that the overall result is going to look just as the exit poll has forecast.’
There was a pause at the other end of the phone. Then Nick’s voice. ‘God. Awful. First Danny. And Vince. And Ed. Now you. We are being totally wiped out.’
‘How are things in Sheffield?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he sighed. ‘It looks OK. I think we are a few thousand on the right side of the line. But I cannot feel remotely happy about it. Going back to Parliament with ten MPs and without any of you is going to be so tough. And it is just such a massive setback for the party.’
We ended the call and I decided to go to our constituency office in Yeovil, to be ready to travel to my election count when the result was imminent.
I said goodbye to Joan and asked her to call my mother again, who I knew would be bitterly upset. I left 4 Whitehall, knowing that this would now be the only Whitehall address I would need to visit for a very long time.
My result was supposed to come in around 2 a.m. but it was endlessly delayed. I sat alone in my office in Yeovil as Lib Dem MP after Lib Dem MP fell. Simon Hughes, in London, looked close to tears – he had lost after thirty-three years as MP. A shell-shocked Vince Cable had also lost, astonishingly, in Twickenham. Ed Davey, who had won Kingston and Surbiton against all odds in 1997, was also gone, along with the brilliant Pensions Minister and local campaigner Steve Webb in Thornbury and Yate. The only recompense to me was that it didn’t feel personal – the Liberal Democrats were simply being swept away in an electoral tsunami.
Then, finally, at around 5 a.m., I headed for my own count to accept my defeat. Our Lib Dem counting agents looked shattered – including many of my brilliant constituency office staff, who knew their own jobs were now gone too.
The result was declared, and I left by a side door, dodging the press.
On the edge of Yeovil, I stopped the car in a lay-by and replied to a whole series of sympathetic text messages coming through from political friends and foes alike. And then, with the public show of the count behind me, and in the privacy of my car, it was no longer possible to hold back all the emotion.
It was no longer necessary to drive straight for London, as I had planned, so with the sun of a new day rising in the sky, I headed elsewhere, to rest and recuperate.
After pulling in to a service station for petrol, I had a call from Danny Alexander.
‘Hi, it’s Danny here. I am sorry about your result.’
‘Likewise,’ I said. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ replied Danny. ‘We fought a very strong campaign, but I always knew it was going to be tough.’
‘Well, one silver lining is that we won’t have to spend the next five days locked away with Labour or the Tories talking about coalitions,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ laughed Danny. ‘I don’t think we need today’s planned meeting of the coalition negotiating committee any more either!’
‘That’s probably a good thing,’ I said, ‘because not a single one of our team was re-elected. Steve Webb has also lost, as has Lynne Featherstone. In fact, we need to tell Nick that he did a pretty bloody awful job of choosing the negotiating committee!’
‘I’m sure Nick would appreciate hearing that!’ joked Danny.
This painful day might have been over for Danny and for me, and we might even be able to engage in a little gallows humour. But it was not over for Nick Clegg.
He had known, of course, immediately, that this was the end of his leadership, and that the scale of defeat was so serious that an announcement could not be delayed.
But the emotional pressure was immense, not just because of his personal circumstances but because of his feeling of horror as he saw one MP after another lose their seats.
He chain smoked all night. On an early morning conference call, he revealed to his closest staff that he would travel back to London after the Sheffield count and announce that he was standing down as leader.
Nick’s speech writer and press adviser, Phil Reilly, went round to Nick’s home in Sheffield and together they wrote out his resignation speech.
Then the Liberal Democrat leader was off to his Sheffield count, trying to keep his composure in the face of jeering Labour supporters and the endless drip-drip-drip of bad news from constituency counts across the country.
Only after the count did Nick allow his emotions to get the better of him in his car, travelling to the airport.
At the airport, he and his team met up with one of his closest political advisers, Matthew Hanney, who looked exhausted and shell-shocked. On the plane down to London, Nick practised his resignation speech – and he was determined to get through it all without breaking down.
Nick Clegg’s team, led by his trusted chief of staff Jonny Oates, had prepared for every possible eventuality. They had hired a central London venue, knowing that this was where Nick would deliver one of two speeches: either his response to a hung parliament, with possible terms for entering a second coalition, or his resignation speech. It was now to be the latter.
The speech was well received, and Nick got through it – just about – while holding his emotions together.
By some awful coincidence, there was then a Victory in Europe Day commemoration to attend in Whitehall, with David Cameron and Ed Miliband.
The three party leaders met in a room in the Foreign Office, where an over-zealous army officer insisted on taking them in great detail through the arrangements for the event. Other Conservative ministers present looked uncomfortable, and avoided looking the former Deputy Prime Minister in the face.
The Prime Minister also seemed uncomfortable and ill at ease. Later, after the ceremony, he spoke briefly to Nick, telling him that he had been reading the Liberal Democrat manifesto just a few days before and that he thought some of its policies were ‘really quite good’. David Cameron admitted that just the day before he had also been drafting his own possible resignation statement. The Prime Minister was also clearly surprised by some of the seats his party had won, admitting that he had only visited seats such as Twickenham to ‘tweak our tail’.
‘I’d say just this,’ replied Nick Clegg. ‘Build on what we achieved together – don’t squander it.’
From George Osborne, there was a heartfelt and generous message, by text, as is the way in modern government, as well as in modern life: ‘You didn’t deserve it. I have admired you and what we did together in government.’
And then, for Nick Clegg, there was the most difficult part of all: returning home to his family, including his three young boys, who had been hearing all day on the news of their father’s humiliation, and now his resignation.
On Saturday morning, Nick Clegg woke early, feeling very low. He dragged himself out of bed and said to his son Antonio that they should go to the shops together and buy a mobile phone. In the world beyond government, Nick Clegg would now need a new telephone to replace the security-protected devices he had been required to use since 2010.
Nick was nervous about the possible public reaction to him out in Putney High Street, near to his house. He worried that people would be confrontational or rude, but in fact the response was universally warm and almost overwhelming. Person after person came up to commiserate with him. One woman hugged him, saying that she was very sad at the result and that the Liberal Democrats had done a brilliant job in government. ‘Thanks so much for your support,’ said Nick.
‘Oh,’ the lady replied. ‘It’s a bit embarrassing. I actually voted Green!’
Another woman came up to say to say that Nick and his party did not deserve the results which they had received. ‘You did the right thing going into government. You made some mistakes, definitely, but you did a lot of good things too. We are worried that the Lib Dems aren’t there any more to moderate the others. You are going to be missed.’
The warm reaction – in excess even of the public reaction after ‘Cleggmania’ in 2010 – made an impact on Nick, and he could see that it did on his son, too. On the previous evening it had seemed that the only story was about Liberal Democrat failure and electoral humiliation. But there was another story, too – the story of a small party of MPs who went into government at a time of national crisis, and of that party’s five years of work in government to bring the economy back from the brink and make Britain a fairer and more liberal country.
It is a story of some errors, and of many achievements.
And that is the story which this book will tell.
2010
A HUNG PARLIAMENT
MAY 2010
General Election Day 2010 – at last, the long wait was over. And, at last, there was some room in my kitchen again. When Gordon Brown seemed likely to call an election back in 2007, I had ordered the printing of our first general election leaflet. When Mr Brown changed his mind, my local party considered that it was too expensive to reprint this leaflet again, so I had been obliged to store 45,000 A3 ‘Election Flying Start’ leaflets in the kitchen of my constituency home – for two and a half years. Now they were all gone.
I did the usual things for a general election day: got up at around 5 a.m., delivered ‘Good Morning’ leaflets to voters in Freedom Avenue and Springfield Road in Yeovil, then visited some polling stations, and afterwards knocked on doors to remind Liberal Democrat supporters to vote.
I finished in East Yeovil at around 8.30 p.m., and now, just as on election night 2015, I was at 4 Whitehall, South Petherton, about to have dinner with local party activist Joan Raikes while waiting for the first exit polls.
For the first and only time in my political career, I was not that worried about the result in my own constituency. The Liberal Democrat campaign had been successful both locally and nationally – boosted by Nick Clegg’s very strong performances in the televised election debates.
I was expecting a majority of over 10,000 in Yeovil, and the latest intelligence from those at the top of the national party suggested that we could expect to win over eighty seats across the UK – well up on our present total of sixty-three seats.
At 10 p.m., as Joan and I were about to start eating, the BBC election programme began, with its stirring and distinctive election night music. I was optimistic and excited. Eighty seats would be the party’s best performance since well before the Second World War, and it would also guarantee a hung parliament, and herald a possible Liberal Democrat role in government.
But as the first forecasts flashed onto television screens across the country, I received a huge shock. The projected vote share and seat number were well below both our party’s and the media’s expectations. Instead of the large numbers of gains we expected, we saw predicted losses. I was inclined to dismiss the projections as a rogue poll, particularly as I heard the positive news coming in from my election count and from other Somerset constituencies.
Eventually, the call came through from my election agent, Sam: ‘You need to come to the count. You’ve won comfortably – the majority will be over 11,000.’
By the time I had reached the Westland Centre in the heart of Yeovil, the counting had finished. I was home and dry with a majority of 13,036, the largest in the constituency’s history.
The returning officer called the candidates and election agents together and went through the spoilt ballot papers. All the candidates agreed solemnly that the ballot paper on which was written ‘They’re all useless bastards’ couldn’t be considered as a vote for any of us.
I made my acceptance speech and then got in my car to drive back to London.
Most winning candidates on election night either join their supporters for some drinks and celebrations or head straight to bed.
But I could do neither – a year before, Nick Clegg had asked me to be one of four MPs who would constitute the Liberal Democrat negotiating team in the event of a hung parliament, just as he would do five years later, ahead of the 2015 campaign. The plan was for the four of us – Danny Alexander, Chris Huhne, Andrew Stunell and me – to head back to London as soon as our election results were confirmed, so that we could start our planning.
As I drove back to London, listening to the election coverage on the radio, I realised that our excellent Liberal Democrat results in Somerset were the exception. Nationally, we had lost a number of seats we’d expected to hold, and we had missed securing almost all our target seats. After the ecstasy of Cleggmania, it was a massive disappointment.
I was the first MP back into our party headquarters in Cowley Street in London, where the mood was sombre. But however disappointing the results were, it was impossible to ignore one salient fact: the UK was heading for a hung parliament in which the Liberal Democrats would be a powerful player. Indeed, it was possible that our party was on the threshold of entering government for the first time since the Second World War.
The final polling projections had the Conservatives on 306 seats, Labour on 258, and the Liberal Democrats with 57. The smaller parties had around 30 seats combined.
Nick Clegg had made clear throughout the general election campaign that in the event of a hung parliament we would talk first to the party with the greatest electoral mandate to form a government – ‘the largest number of seats and votes’, as we put it. This did not mean that we would only contemplate going into government with the largest party, but we thought it would look very odd to talk first to the losing party. The party with the largest number of seats and votes was the Conservative Party.
Nick arrived back in London from his own count in Sheffield later than expected, at around 10.40 a.m. He did his best to look positive, but he was shattered by the disappointment of losing seats, after what had seemed such a successful campaign. On the steps outside our 4 Cowley Street headquarters, he announced to the waiting media that he would stick to his pledge: the party with the largest number of seats and votes would have the first opportunity to form a government.
Once inside party headquarters, Nick made a speech from the top of the main staircase to Liberal Democrat staff and volunteers, thanking them for their hard work. When he finished speaking there was warm applause, but he turned quickly away and entered the small first-floor conference room, choking back tears of emotion and disappointment.
This small conference room that Nick now entered was hardly a fitting assembly point for our first power-sharing discussions. It had been used for the last twenty years or so as the preparation room for Liberal Democrat press conferences, which were held next door in a larger, oak-panelled, conference room. In this small room, the party leader, a researcher and one or two press officers would regularly prepare to launch the latest little-noticed Liberal Democrat policy paper. Amongst the small audience of people seated next door awaiting the press conference would be Liberal Democrat researchers and staff, to make up the numbers. If we were lucky, there would also be a junior reporter from the Financial Times, someone from the BBC and a stray regional reporter who found himself without anything better to do.
But now this little conference room was bursting full of senior MPs and party staff. We were there to consider the formation of the next government of the United Kingdom. There was not much time for wondering what had gone wrong.
In considering how to react next, we were not starting from a blank piece of paper. For six months, Danny Alexander, Chris Huhne, Andrew Stunell and I had been meeting to consider what our strategy would be should we find ourselves facing a hung parliament.
We had produced for Nick Clegg, in early March, a confidential paper entitled ‘Post-Election Strategy: Recommendations’. Its principal conclusions had been accepted by Nick, in spite of the fact that Chris Huhne had tabled a last-minute ‘Minority Report’. Chris had made clear that he believed the only viable strategy for the Liberal Democrats in a hung parliament was to go into a full coalition. The rest of us considered that in some circumstances it would be better for us to remain outside government – possibly in a ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement, where, in exchange for various policy agreements, we would support a minority government in key votes.
Our post-election strategy paper had anticipated that the Conservatives would be the largest party. Our conclusion was:
In the event of the Conservative Party failing to secure a majority but having the strongest mandate, we can expect an immediate, very warm, and very public approach from David Cameron. It would be important to respond positively to such an invitation, by entering into discussions in which all options are on the table.
However, the strategy paper concluded – against Chris Huhne’s wishes – that a full coalition was ‘extremely unlikely’, because we did not expect the Conservatives to concede on key Liberal Democrat demands such as electoral reform. We also assumed that any policy deal might not be strong enough to persuade Liberal Democrat members to support a coalition.
Now, in the late morning of Friday 7 May 2010, we prepared for this ‘immediate, very warm’ offer. And every way we looked at the numbers, it seemed unlikely that a coalition with Labour could be a success – even together, the two parties would not be able to command a majority in Parliament. Nor were we remotely attracted by the idea of putting the unpopular Gordon Brown back into Downing Street.
But a coalition with Labour was not completely impossible, if minor parties supported it, and in any case it would strengthen our negotiating position if we had two large parties to talk to rather than one.
As Chris Huhne now pointed out: ‘It is absolutely vital to strengthen our bargaining position by making a rainbow coalition a real possibility. If we can do this, we might even persuade David Cameron to accept a referendum on voting reform.’
So, we decided that although we would talk to the Conservatives first, we should not rule out talks with Labour. Gordon Brown had already been in contact with Vince Cable and was desperately trying to fix an early call with Nick Clegg.
Nick was already forming a clear view of what he thought should happen next. As he put it to our meeting on Friday morning: ‘I have to say that based on the existing arithmetic in the Commons, I am incredibly dubious that a rainbow coalition can deliver. I also think the markets would go nuts. It would be really difficult to take tough action to tackle the deficit, and that could mean higher interest rates and the UK being targeted by the markets in the same way as Greece, Portugal and the other high-debt countries. I am seriously worried about that prospect.
‘And as for Gordon Brown, I have to tell you that I believe he would be incapable of leading a coalition government, and that he would be unacceptable to the country. But let’s be absolutely clear, a minority Conservative administration would lead quickly to a second general election. This would be bad for the economy, bad for the country, and a big political risk for us. I think it will be tough to negotiate what we want from either the Conservatives or Labour. But failure would condemn us and the country to a second general election.’
Later in the day, David Cameron made his ‘big, open and comprehensive’ offer to the Liberal Democrats from St Stephen’s Club in Queen Anne’s Gate. And in the afternoon, he spoke to Nick Clegg and pressed for early talks with the Liberal Democrat negotiating team; these were fixed for 7.30 that evening in the Cabinet Office in Whitehall.
Our team met for half an hour at the National Liberal Club beforehand – although we had some difficulty in persuading a sceptical doorkeeper to let us in.
Meanwhile, Gordon Brown had also made a strong pitch by phone to Nick Clegg, asking for parallel talks with the Labour Party. Nick made clear that such talks could not yet start: he had promised to talk first to the largest party in Parliament, and he was determined to honour that pledge.
These first talks with the Conservative side that evening went well. David Cameron had assembled his negotiating team from his most trusted allies: William Hague, George Osborne, Oliver Letwin, and his chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn. Both sides found the discussions to be warmer, more relaxed and more open than might otherwise have been expected. The Conservative team seemed to be interested in serious talks about how a joint policy programme could be drawn up that would deliver as many of our key priorities as possible.
In preparing for the possibility of coalition talks, and in drawing up the Liberal Democrat manifesto, we had already settled on what our main policy priorities would be. These were highlighted on the first pages of our manifesto and clearly communicated during the election campaign. The four main priorities were: clearing up the economic mess left by Labour and building a ‘green’ economy; raising the tax-free personal allowance to £10,000 per year; introducing a £2.5 billion ‘pupil premium’ to target more support at children from disadvantaged backgrounds in the schools system; and delivering an ambitious programme of political reform – including proportional representation.
We briefly discussed all four issues with the Conservatives in our Sunday evening meeting. As we expected, the issue of proportional representation was going to prove the most difficult to negotiate. David Cameron had already proposed some kind of ‘review’ about voting systems, but I made clear in this first meeting that this would be regarded by my party as an unacceptable solution, designed to kick the issue into the long grass. William Hague responded: ‘This is a very difficult issue for the Conservatives.’
George Osborne suggested that a confidence and supply agreement might be acceptable to the Conservative team although ‘David Cameron’s strong view is that he would prefer the stability of a full coalition.’
On Saturday 8 May, Nick Clegg spent most of the morning meeting with the Liberal Democrat ‘shadow Cabinet’ and with our new parliamentary party. The agreement of our parliamentary party and of the ‘Federal Executive’ of the Liberal Democrat Party would be necessary to approve any coalition agreement. Even after this, the party constitution required a further vote of approval by a special conference of party members. This ‘triple lock’ meant that there was no question of going into coalition without the strong support of a majority of the party.
Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and I had expected many of our MPs to be unenthusiastic about the prospect of doing deals with the other two parties, and particularly with the Conservatives – our ‘traditional’ enemy at Westminster. In fact, at these first two meetings, most of our MPs spoke out strongly in favour of some kind of stable agreement being reached. Chris Huhne warned that without an agreement, we might rapidly face a second general election – which he predicted could cost us twenty of our fifty-seven seats. None of our MPs relished the prospect of a second general election, and there was a concern that we might be blamed by the electorate if we were not seen to be acting in the national interest.
Most MPs highlighted how unpopular it would be to go into coalition with a Gordon Brown-led Labour Party. Many stressed what our negotiating team had already decided: even if we could not extract a pledge on proportional representation, we should press for a referendum on the Alternative Vote. The Alternative Vote was a far more modest form of electoral reform, in which candidates were ranked in preference order by voters. The votes of the bottom candidates were then redistributed until one candidate had at least 50 per cent of the vote.
On Saturday afternoon, we held a first, brief, and secret meeting with the team that Gordon Brown had decided would negotiate for Labour: Peter Mandelson, Andrew Adonis, Ed Balls, Harriet Harman and Ed Miliband. This took place in a conference room in Portcullis House, where many MPs had their Westminster offices, rather than in the Cabinet Office itself. Chris Huhne undiplomatically took it on himself to try to raise the issue of Gordon Brown’s leadership and whether he should be stepping down as Labour leader to clear the way for a coalition deal. This irritated the chair of our negotiating team, Danny Alexander, because it had already been decided that this issue should be addressed in private by Nick Clegg. ‘No, Chris, that is not a matter we are discussing,’ Danny interrupted.
On Sunday, our first substantive talks began with the Conservatives. We were back in the Cabinet Office, in a huge room up on the third floor that had once been used by Michael Heseltine when he was Deputy Prime Minister. It was probably the largest office I had ever seen, and it was to be taken over in due course by the Conservative minister Francis Maude.
On the commencement of the talks, we declined an offer from Gus O’Donnell, the head of the civil service, to have civil servants in the room ‘facilitating’ the meeting. It was a good decision: it allowed us to deal with each other in a direct, open and straightforward way.
William Hague and George Osborne suggested that we might want to meet the Governor of the Bank of England and the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury later in the day. We rejected that offer too – concerned that this might simply be a subtle trap, designed to manoeuvre us into supporting Conservative economic policy. This was undoubtedly the right decision and avoided the Bank of England and the Treasury becoming entangled in the politics of forming a coalition.
We decided to tackle the toughest issues on this first day: political reform in the morning session and economic policy in the afternoon.
Some of the political reform agenda was easy to agree on. The Conservatives speedily signed up to our proposal to move to fixed-term parliaments. We had suggested four years. George Osborne intervened to suggest five years – ‘in case the economy takes a bit longer than expected to fix’, he said. It turned out to be a very important decision.
On House of Lords reform, there was also a joint agreement to move to a predominantly elected House, though William Hague warned that ‘the leadership of our party is fine on this. But our backbenchers are rather more anti.’
We Liberal Democrats had already signalled in the first talks on Saturday night that electoral reform would be the potential deal-breaker for us. But we did not wish the talks to be seen to fail solely on a matter of political reform. So we agreed that if we had to reject the coalition option, the main reasons we would give would relate to economic and social policy.
We now decided to see if we could break the log jam on electoral reform, using a proposal that I had advocated in our preparations for coalition talks over the past few months.
Danny Alexander now put forward this proposal: a referendum on the Alternative Vote, in exchange for our support for Conservative proposals to redraw the parliamentary boundaries, to reduce the number of MPs and make constituencies more equal in terms of voter numbers. This was designed to be just one part of a radical package to transform Britain’s outdated political system. For Nick Clegg, deficit reduction and political reform were to be the two main pillars of the coalition policy agenda.
We tried to ‘sell’ the Alternative Vote to the Conservatives as a reform of the first past the post system, but it did not take long for George Osborne to see what we were getting at. ‘This would be really difficult for the Conservative Party,’ added William Hague.
‘But surely you could just impose this on your backbenchers,’ said Chris Huhne. ‘Everyone knows that while the Liberal Democrats are a democratic party, the Conservatives are more like an absolute monarchy.’
‘Chris,’ interrupted William Hague. ‘You are right. The Conservative Party is like an absolute monarchy – but an absolute monarchy that is qualified by regicide. If we took this deal back to our colleagues in the Conservative parliamentary party, we would no longer be their leaders. They would instantly get rid of us.’
George Osborne said that he also considered that a whipped vote of Conservative MPs on an AV referendum would be ‘impossible’.
‘Look, in that case this is all very difficult,’ I said. ‘We have problems too. We cannot sell a coalition deal to our MPs and to our party members without a referendum on voting reform. And this is already the weakest acceptable type of voting reform. You have to realise that if we go into coalition with you, it is inevitable that our vote share will decline. Without the prospect of voting reform, a coalition would just be too dangerous for us.’
George Osborne made one last attempt at agreement: ‘We could give you a guaranteed free vote on AV in the Commons before the end of this year. It would probably get through, because it is Labour policy as well. But we cannot go further.’
We had made good progress on a range of issues, but we seemed to have hit a brick wall. Neither side would concede further. ‘OK,’ said Danny Alexander, ‘I think we need a time-out, to take stock.’
In the afternoon, we turned to economic policy. We discussed deficit reduction and agreed to consider some small in-year cuts in public spending in 2010. Our own election manifesto had suggested that substantive spending cuts should probably start in 2011, to allow the economy to recover before fiscal tightening began. But since our manifesto had been written, our own economy had strengthened, while the international and financial market situation had become much more risky. We considered that a modest and symbolic cut in public spending in 2010 would send out a strong signal to the financial markets, help bring economic stability and reduce any pressure on the UK bond markets – and hence on interest rates.
On taxation, we made clear that we were not willing to budge on our manifesto pledge of delivering a £10,000 personal allowance before the end of the parliament.
George Osborne was concerned about whether a £10,000 allowance was affordable. ‘The advice from the Treasury is that deficit reduction needs higher taxes as well as spending cuts,’ he said. ‘Fine,’ we argued. ‘Raise taxes on those on very high incomes.’ We insisted that this was a bottom-line issue for us: ‘It is good for those on low incomes, will help improve work incentives and will create a fairer tax system,’ argued Danny Alexander.
I also insisted that we would accept nothing less than a £2.5 billion pupil premium, which had to be additional money and not just ‘smoke and mirrors’. George Osborne tried to avoid being pinned down on the numbers – ‘I’m not against it, but it will be very tough to fund’ – but I was determined not to give an inch. My Liberal Democrat colleagues watched our tussle with amusement – I had fought similarly hard for the pledge to be included in our own manifesto.
By the end of the afternoon, we had made a lot of progress but we could not reach an agreement on electoral reform. We returned to Nick Clegg’s office in the House of Commons. Nick had spoken to Gordon Brown earlier in the day and he told us that the Labour leader was ‘desperate for a deal. He is saying he will step down, to clear the way for a Liberal Democrat–Labour coalition. He is also promising a referendum on AV.’
Some senior Liberal Democrats still thought that a coalition with Labour would be politically toxic. Others wanted to explore the possibility further – if only to strengthen our bargaining position.
Nick was worried. ‘If we go with the Tories, we have a coalition with political legitimacy, but we cannot take this risk without major political reform. But if we go in with Labour, it will be very unpopular, and the government could collapse a few months later, because the numbers for a coalition with Labour just don’t stack up. We are between a rock and a hard place.’
Andrew Stunell cautioned against us rushing into any decisions: ‘We are all very tired. We need to take a deep breath and get this right. And we need to realise that from a public and media perspective there is a real, real difficulty legitimising Labour after they have lost the election so badly.’
Monday 10 May was undoubtedly the most dramatic day of the coalition talks. We met the Conservative team again in the morning. They weren’t prepared to budge on the AV referendum; instead they tabled a draft confidence and supply agreement. This would have allowed the Conservatives to form a minority administration, while the Liberal Democrats would have stayed on the opposition benches. The Liberal Democrats would have been obliged to vote with the Conservatives on confidence votes and on the Budget. In addition, we would have had to sign up to support a programme based on ‘the bulk of the Conservative manifesto.’
