Cameron at 10: The Inside Story 2010-2015
By Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon, William Collins, 624 pages, £20
“Everyone is trying to find out the secret of David Cameron, but he is exactly what he appears to be. There’s no mystery.” Or so said former Tory spin doctor Dominic Cummings of the man who brought the Conservatives back from the dead, yet whom he depicted as little more than a genial second-rater who got lucky. But what if there is more to the man with the knack of pulling off the apparently impossible?
After all, Cameron held together a coalition that initially wasn’t expected to last until Christmas for five long years, and then became the first prime minister since Palmerston to increase his majority in office despite an austerity programme that inflicted pain on many voters.
The story of how he managed it should be as interesting to Labour, now trying to make its own way back from the wilderness, as to Tories. What better time to get right under his skin? But, sadly, that isn’t quite what Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon’s book does, for all that it is billed as the “inside story” of Cameron’s first term in Downing Street.
This is effectively the first official history of the last government, and perhaps inevitably it’s a weighty read, its only real concession to the increasingly lively nature of modern political biography being that it is written entirely in the present tense — a narrative device presumably designed to provide a sense of being right there in the room watching events unfold, although I’m afraid I found it mildly irritating.
There are no huge smoking guns, but there is the odd juicy bit of gossip: Cameron’s gradual falling out with his controversial guru Steve Hilton culminates in Hilton wandering around No 10 muttering “I don’t know what they stand for any more or what the [expletive] point is in being here”, while Boris Johnson will doubtless enjoy learning that his younger brother Jo (head of Downing Street’s policy unit, and now minister for universities and science) refers to him in private as a “colourful local government leader”.
Buried in a long verbatim report of a meeting with Angela Merkel, meanwhile, is important confirmation of what Westminster has long assumed: that the starting point for the Prime Minister’s much-vaunted tough negotiation with the EU is that in a referendum he very much wants to vote “In”.
Cameron is quoted as telling Germany’s chancellor: “I am passionate about the single market, I am passionate about foreign policy cooperation, but if I don’t listen to British public opinion then Britain will depart from Europe ... what I want are changes that will make it possible for Britain to stay in.”
The useful questions about Cameron with which the authors introduce their account — is he really an essay-crisis Prime Minister, making it all up as he goes along? Is he faintly sexist, or was the “Calm down, dear” contretemps overblown? Why is he tolerated rather than loved by the party he restored to power? — are never satisfactorily answered, however. The detail is exhaustive, but it is hard to see the wood for the trees.
Unlike the imminent rival biography from Tory peer Lord Ashcroft and former “Sunday Times” journalist Isabel Oakeshott, “Call Me Dave”, which one suspects may be rather saltier, this book is authorised — which means it benefits from extensive access to the Prime Minister’s advisers. But the flip side is that it rarely shows us Cameron from the perspective of ministers outside the charmed circle, or even of his MPs; and it suffers, too, from a slight lack of curiosity. Too many leads go cold just as you felt you were getting somewhere.
We are told Cameron’s staff have “never seen him so anxious” as during the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, when his private texts with Rebekah Brooks were published and he had to testify publicly about his relationship with Rupert Murdoch’s empire. But there is no explanation as to why this was apparently more nerve-racking than, say, committing troops to Libya or losing Tory MPs to Ukip or narrowly averting the breakup of the United Kingdom.
The book says that staff didn’t think he had a “guilty secret” but it feels as if a piece of the jigsaw is missing. That feeling recurs on learning that Cameron had a private dinner with Johnson in 2013 that marked a “turning point” in their destructively competitive relationship.
Was this their “Granita moment”, the night a deal was done on Johnson backing off in return for a clear run at the leadership once Cameron’s gone? Who knows; one throwaway sentence is all we get.
There is a wonderful story, too, about Cameron holding a summit on Afghanistan to which he invites some so-called “wild men” — outsiders whose role is to shake up the military with some left-field thinking on the war. Although “outsiders” maybe isn’t the word, given that one is an old Etonian and Oxford journalist friend of Cameron’s.
The irresistible image of his old college mate, sitting between the head of MI6 and the chair of the joint intelligence committee telling them how to deal with the Taliban, says much about Cameron’s well-known dependence on people from his own social milieu.
But it also hints at a lesser-spotted subversive streak, a desire to challenge conventional thinking. This is the radical side to which Hilton was drawn, which he felt was constantly in conflict with Cameron’s conservative side — it would be intriguing to know how that informs his politics, but the idea isn’t developed.
So where will Cameron go next, now he is freed from the constraints of both coalition and (having said he won’t stand again in 2020) re-election? The authors record Barack Obama telling him that in future the US wants Britain to commit to airstrikes in Syria, do more to fight Boko Haram in Nigeria and to stabilise Libya, so don’t be surprised to see those loom large in a second term. But, otherwise, this book concentrates on his legacy, not his future.
The book concludes that he has had “partial success” in foreign policy, despite the grim aftermath of intervention in Libya and failure to get parliamentary consent for bombing Syria. At home, he didn’t eliminate the deficit as promised but did deliver some kind of economic recovery after hasty in-flight changes to the much-vaunted “Plan A”. All of which fits the academic John Curtice’s pre-election judgment, quoted by Seldon, that Cameron has been “kind of average” — less dominant than Thatcher or a Blair, but not terrible either.
Perhaps, then, Cummings is right and there is really no more to him than this. But if he is wrong and this sphinx does contain a riddle after all — well, it remains to be solved.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
