From The Sunday Times
May 16, 2010
Against the wall
As the election result became clear, the secret meetings began. Our correspondents reveal the frantic deal-making that brought in our new political era
Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg enter 10 Downing Street in London
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Isabel Oakeshott, Marie Woolf and Jonathan Oliver
All day, Tory high command had been cock-a-hoop. They were certain they were in line for a majority of 20-30. Lord Ashcroft’s private polling had consistently shown the party would perform far better in key marginals than public opinion polls suggested.
The most senior figures in the party were privately telling friends the election was “going to be like 1992 — we’re going to do far better than people expect”. How wrong could they be?
It was day one of Britain’s May revolution when political tradition was turned on its head, constitutional convention was tossed aside, enemies became allies, a new generation seized power — and a widely reviled prime minister became human in the pathos of defeat.
The full story of the hung parliament of 2010 has yet to be told, but this is the first chapter: the inside account of what happened after the voters went to the polls on May 6 and plunged Britain’s political elite into crisis.
Strange secrets emerge. Who would have thought that the man who publicly ridiculed Gordon Brown as a cross between Stalin and Mr Bean was actually a backstairs confidant who had friendly fireside chats with him?
FRIDAY, MAY 7
The awful truth dawned on David Cameron, the Conservative leader, at about 3am. Over chilli con carne at his Oxfordshire home, he and his inner circle had remained bullish when the exit polls suggested the party would not get a majority in the House of Commons. They simply did not believe the figures.
But as he was driven back to London down the M40, crucial marginals on the Tory target list failed to fall. By the time Cameron reached his Millbank HQ, he realised the polls were right. He had not won a clear mandate to govern. Those close to him say he appeared dazed.
“He was barely functioning. His mind was whirring. All he could think was how, after five years of his change agenda, he could have failed?” said one.
Brilliantly adaptable, however, the Tory leader rapidly adjusted to the new landscape. He had a pressing problem: saving his own skin. He knew that his party disposed ruthlessly of those who led it to defeat — which meant himself and his closest ally, George Osborne, who had co-ordinated the campaign.
“Dave is the leader of Europe’s leading regicide specialists. He knew right away his bollocks were on the line. He had to think very quickly how he and George were going to get out of this alive,” an intimate said.
Instantly, insiders say, Cameron concluded that a coalition with the Liberal Democrats was the only way to safeguard his own position.
One said: “He thought a minority government would mean another election, probably within months. He knew he had misjudged this election campaign — and that was after five years of preparation. Everyone was saying that another election in the autumn would probably give us a decent majority, but he couldn’t see any reason why they’d necessarily do any better.
“A full coalition would protect him not only from the electorate, but from his own mutinous backbenchers, a lot of whom are furious about the way the campaign was handled.”
Cameron stayed at Millbank until dawn before crossing the river to the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge hotel, where he and Sam, his wife, had booked a suite. Sam stayed with him till 8am, when she returned to their North Kensington home, unable to sleep.
Gordon Brown, too, was calculating the odds on survival. He had summoned his team to his house near Edinburgh before going to his count at Kirkcaldy.
“He had seen the exit polls,” said one of those present, “but it was too soon to know if this would be a hung parliament or defeat for Labour.”
He joined local Labour activists holding a party at a Kirkcaldy hotel. When news came through that Labour had retaken nearby Dunfermline and West Fife from the Liberal Democrats, Brown punched the air and cried: “Yes!” He and his team boarded a charter jet at Edinburgh airport at about 3am, feeling nervous because many of the key results would come through in the next hour while they were in the air and unable to receive information. As they landed at Northolt, west London, they heard that Labour had retaken Rochdale — the home of Gillian Duffy, the “bigoted woman” of Brown’s biggest election gaffe — from the Lib Dems. There were cheers.
Brown went straight to Labour’s Victoria Street HQ in central London. After thanking the troops, he was briefed by the party’s two chief strategists, David Muir and Greg Cook (known as “Mystic Greg” because of his ability to predict election results accurately). It was clear that the Tories would get more than 300 seats. Labour would be the smaller party, but an alliance with the Lib Dems and other minor parties might be arithmetically feasible. Brown returned to No 10, defeated but not quite out of office, and went to sleep.
Nick Clegg was in a deep gloom as he boarded the first train from his Sheffield constituency to London shortly after dawn.The Lib Dem leader was in a state of shock at how his extraordinary popularity during the campaign had translated itself into a loss of parliamentary seats on election day. Final opinion polls had suggested that the Lib Dems were on the verge of an historic breakthrough, winning at least 75 seats, possibly as many as 90. He now faced humiliation with only 57.
Settling down next to his press secretary, Lena Pietsch, he rang his old mentor, Lord Ashdown. There was no time for dwelling on what might have been, the former special forces soldier told him briskly, he had to focus on the job in hand. Though the numbers were agonising, the Lib Dems still held the balance of power between the Tories and Labour. Clegg should begin drafting a statement honouring his public commitment to talk first to the party with the largest number of seats and biggest share of the vote — the Tories.
By the time the train pulled into St Pancras, Clegg had the outline ready. He was feeling better. At party HQ in Cowley Street, Westminster, he and Pietsch shut themselves in a room with John Sharkey, chairman of the campaign team, and Jonny Oates, a communications adviser, to work on the statement. Occasionally, they called Ashdown for advice.
The Lib Dems had three options: a coalition with the Tories or Labour, or a “confidence and supply” deal with the Tories — meaning that, in return for concessions on policy, they would sustain them in office without being coalition partners.
“Initially, everyone agreed that the one thing we did not want to do was have a Tory coalition,” said an insider who played a pivotal role in the negotiations. On the face of it, however, entering a coalition with Labour looked impossible. The numbers simply didn’t stack up. And so the party’s spin for the next battle was hammered out: the Lib Dems were “talking to the Tories and listening to Labour”.
Other calculating political minds were also at work. Immediately after Thursday night’s exit poll, Lord Mandelson and Alan Johnson, key Labour ministers, had hit the television studios to talk up the idea of a “progressive alliance” with the Lib Dems. They asked like-minded members of the cabinet — including Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, and Lord Adonis, the transport secretary — to call left-of-centre Lib Dems, including Simon Hughes, the former party president, and the former leaders Charles Kennedy and Sir Menzies Campbell. Shaun Woodward, the Northern Ireland secretary, was asked to square the various factions from the province to support a potential rainbow coalition.
After barely two hours’ sleep, Brown woke for a council of war with Mandelson, Adonis and other advisers. Sources who were with him in No 10 insist that at no point did he think he could continue in office indefinitely. However, that morning he believed he could remain as prime minister in a Lib-Lab coalition for about 18 months, to secure Britain’s recovery from recession. “Gordon genuinely believed and probably still believes that he was the right man to ensure Britain recovered from recession,” an aide said.
Adonis, a one-time Oxford politics lecturer, told Brown that a Lib-Lab coalition was not only viable but could offer stable government. Deliberations at No 10 were interrupted at 10.40am, however, by television pictures of Clegg on the steps of his headquarters, announcing that his party would open talks with the Tories.
Across the Thames, a cheer went up in Cameron’s hotel room where senior Tories were meeting. He had decided a plan of action. “We are going to have to make a full, open offer to the Liberal Democrats,” Cameron said. “We can’t go into this with a knife hidden behind our backs. A coalition is going to be the best option.”
In Downing Street, Mandelson and Brown decided to issue a statement at 4pm acknowledging the right of the Lib Dems and Conservatives to negotiate but pointing out that Labour was ready to talk if they failed. Not everyone was in favour. Ed Balls, Brown’s closest ally, arrived in No 10 to urge him not to hang around. It might be better to “go with dignity”.
When the Tories gave notice that Cameron would respond to Clegg at 2.30pm, “we brought forward our own statement to just after 1.30pm”, said a Brown aide. “It allowed us to pre-empt any claims that Gordon was ‘squatting’ in No 10 and get our offer out there to the Lib Dems ahead of Cameron.” The Tory leader’s statement had the bigger impact, however. The Lib Dems were taken aback by his “big, open and comprehensive” offer, which included many of the demands on the Lib Dem menu.
From Osborne’s second-floor corner office at Conservative headquarters, Cameron called Clegg to talk about it. An aide said: “We were all thinking about putting the family pictures back on the desk, thinking we were going to be in opposition for some time to come. But when Dave came out of George’s office, he was very positive. Already he and Nick were talking like old friends. They are both young men, with similar backgrounds. But what really drew them together is that they were both men in highly stressful situations.”
While Clegg and his team were delighted with the Tory offer, the Lib Dems’ old warhorses were sickened at the prospect of sleeping with the enemy. Emails whizzed back and forth between party grandees. Might a deal with Labour be possible instead? Several senior figures, among them Ashdown, Cable, Chris Huhne and Lord Rennard, a former chief executive of the party, thought it might.
They did some number-crunching and concluded that a Lib-Lab minority administration would be viable. They calculated that the smaller parties would be unlikely to join forces to topple it. This was a powerful bargaining tool for their talks with the Tories. There was mounting excitement at Lib Dem HQ. “We suddenly realised we could do a deal both ways.”
Cameron’s offer to the Lib Dems also provoked an immediate and furious response from his old guard. Rightwingers were repulsed at the thought of their leader courting Clegg and his “pinkos”. Alarmed, Cameron rang David Davis, his old rival for the Tory leadership, and a likely magnet for backbench discontent. He wanted to gauge from Davis just how big a problem he might have on his hands. An aide said: “He made noises about offering Davis a job. He wasn’t at all specific. Davis didn’t take it seriously.”
Davis was right not to. Privately, Cameron had told friends he would never trust the former shadow home secretary again, following his decision two years ago to quit his seat dramatically and trigger a by-election over civil liberties. But the Cameroons needed potentially dangerous figures in the party to feel loved. They made sure rumours began circulating in the media that Davis was being lined up for a job — possibly even the Home Office brief.
Direct talks with the Lib Dems began straightaway. The Lib Dem negotiators had been picked months earlier in expectation of a hung parliament. Among them was one of the Tories’ favourite Lib Dems, David Laws, a former banker and key contributor to the “Orange Book” that turned the party towards free-market economic policies. In the early years of the Cameron project, the Tories had hoped Laws might even defect. Osborne had made tentative approaches, but had been sent away with a flea in his ear.
Another negotiator, Danny Alexander, Clegg’s Scots chief of staff, is regarded by colleagues as smart, savvy and trusted by the leader. Huhne and Andrew Stunell, the other two figures on the team, are both seen by colleagues as canny operators. On the Tory side, when the two teams met for the first time that evening, were Osborne, William Hague, the former party leader, Oliver Letwin, the policy guru, and Ed Llewellyn, Cameron’s chief of staff.
Although this was an unprecedented meeting of political rivals who had lacerated each other during the election, they represented an elite with similar values and backgrounds. The Lib Dem negotiators were pleasantly surprised by how amenable Cameron’s group seemed. The Tories were careful not to patronise Clegg’s men.
The negotiators also soon found that they had an unexpected problem. They met in a room in the Cabinet Office with faulty central heating. It was so hot, everyone soon stripped down to shirtsleeves and took their ties off. The talks continued throughout in a subtropical atmosphere.
While the official Lib Dem team sweated, other senior members of the party were being contacted by Downing Street, where there had been consternation at the generosity of Cameron’s offer to the Lib Dems.
“We were genuinely surprised how much the Tories were prepared to compromise,” a Labour insider said. Brown had friends in high places among the Lib Dems. It now emerges that he had been secretly seeking Cable’s counsel since the credit crunch began. This is the same Cable who in November 2007, as Brown’s reputation as prime minister was plummeting, made the Commons howl with laughter at the jibe: “The house has noticed the prime minister’s remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean.”
Yet he had been invited to No 10 several times. According to Labour sources, these fireside chats were form of therapy for Brown, who trusted Cable implicitly. Cable, to his credit, has never spoken of them.
A source said: “Gordon would moan to Vince about how unfair everything was. It started quite soon after he became prime minister. He would call Vince in, ostensibly to discuss economics, but he wasn’t really looking for advice. I don’t think he wanted solutions, just someone to listen.”
During these conversations, the prime minister occasionally hinted that there was a job for Cable if he wanted it. “He did it in a slightly jokey, elliptical way, so there was no embarrassment on either side.”
In the run-up to the election, Brown had also been talking to Menzies Campbell, a friend for decades. Other highly discreet conversations had taken place between senior Lib Dems and Labour cabinet ministers. According to the Lib Dem camp, by the time the election was called, Labour appeared to be well “on side” to do a deal in the event of a hung parliament. Mandelson, at the heart of the contacts, had indicated he understood that Brown would have to resign for a deal to be done.
Midway through the election campaign, Clegg had publicly declared, in an interview with The Sunday Times, that he would not tolerate Brown “squatting” in No 10 if Labour lost the election. The animosity between the two men was ill-concealed, and now, on the afternoon after the election, Brown appeared reluctant to contact Clegg directly. But both Cable and Campbell encouraged him to do so, and that night he rang the Lib Dem leader.
It was not a comfortable conversation — though it was not exactly the angry exchange “laced with threats” that was later reported. According to one of Clegg’s close aides, “Nick did say that Gordon had just ranted down the phone, but it was not so much that Gordon was aggressive — more that he just wasn’t really listening. Gordon was talking at Nick, not to him. It was not really a two-way thing.”
SATURDAY MAY 8
As the country came to terms with the fact that there was no result to the election — no removal vans in Downing Street, no abrupt replacement of the prime minister and his government — the politicians grappled with the outcome, negotiating, manipulating, seeking advantage.
Mandelson sent a series of messages to Clegg, indicating that Brown was ready to resign. The business secretary seemed happy, apparently believing his vision of a Lib-Lab deal was very much on the cards.
Stung by accusations that he was squatting in No 10, Brown flew up to Scotland to get away from the oppressive atmosphere.
At the Lib-Con talks, the amiable Letwin was doing his best to find compromises — “Oliver, you’re turning into an honorary Lib Dem,” one of the Tory negotiators joked — but while the Tories surprised the Lib Dems with their open-mindedness, there was a potentially insurmountable problem: electoral reform. The Lib Dems were not going to be fooled by what they saw as a derisory promise of a “committee of inquiry” into voting change. The Tories indicated that was as far as they were prepared to go. Privately, however, Cameron prepared to improve his offer, driven by rumours of rival negotiations with Labour.
Late in the morning, Clegg addressed a morale-raising meeting of his MPs at Transport House, Smith Square, before joining Brown and Cameron at a Whitehall ceremony marking VE Day’s 65th anniversary. The body language of the three leaders was scrutinised but revealed nothing of what was going on behind the scenes.
Back at Transport House, Clegg’s 56 MPs were trapped inside by a noisy pro-PR demonstration. At one point Mike Hancock, the leftish MP for Portsmouth South, was thought to have flounced out in protest at a possible Tory deal. “He left the meeting because he needed a pee,” explained another MP. “We talked about whether we should have a sign that said ‘I’m leaving because I need a pee’ and hold it up at the window.”
The MPs endorsed Clegg’s strategy of focusing on the “national interest”. However, the clamour in the party for a proper deal on voting reform was becoming deafening. With the Tories apparently refusing to budge, it was clear that Clegg would have to step up communications with Labour.
That evening, after the party’s federal executive also endorsed Clegg’s strategy, Ashdown held an impromptu dinner party with other Lib Dem grandees. They met in the Prince of Wales pub in Kennington — just across the river from Westminster — before trooping back to his house. Over ready meals from Tesco, the mood was upbeat.
About the same time, Clegg and Cameron had a “constructive and amicable” 70-minute meeting in Admiralty House in Whitehall; but Clegg and the prime minister also spoke by phone during the evening at Brown’s request. They agreed that secret Lib-Lab talks should begin the following day. Wooed by both the Tories and Labour, the Lib Dems felt there was all to play for.
SUNDAY MAY 9
Brown discovered that the Lib Dem mood had hardened when he called Cable from Scotland at breakfast time, confirming he was willing to step down. To Brown’s surprise, Cable — not one for confrontation — made it clear that a vague promise of his departure would not be enough for formal talks to get under way. He would have to be specific. Brown was noncommittal. Later in the morning, a “preliminary” private meeting took place between the Lib Dem and Labour representatives.
Arriving back in London, Brown asked to see Clegg. They met for 75 minutes alone in the oak-panelled office of Sir Peter Ricketts, the permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office. Ricketts paced up and down in the corridor outside, saying: “Don’t mind me, I am just renting out my room. I am of no importance.” (A few days later, Cameron made him Britain’s first national security adviser.) Brown and Clegg had a follow-up telephone conversation in which the prime minister, unprompted, offered to step down. “I don’t want to get in the way of things,” he said.
“That’s very good of you,” replied Clegg.
For the first time, Brown put a date on his departure, volunteering to stand down in October. “I’ll stay as interim prime minister until then, but you can be the public face of the coalition,” he told Clegg, adding that he would focus on the economy. Hugely encouraged, Clegg arranged to speak to him again privately later that night.
During the day, the Tory and Lib Dem negotiating teams had appeared to make little progress in the heat of the Cabinet Office. The discussions lasted 6Å hours, but the Lib Dems demanded more Tory concessions on voting reform. It was a low point for Cameron who not only suspected the Lib Dems of two-timing but faced a party rebellion against the talks with them. He spent the evening at Westminster holding an open-door surgery for disgruntled MPs.
A Lib-Lab deal seemed a real prospect. Within hours, however, the picture was radically different. At midnight, Clegg spoke to Brown again. To his dismay, the prime minister had changed his tune. “I don’t want to go quickly. I will go at some point during the parliament,”he growled.
There were echoes of Tony Blair’s prevarication under pressure from Brown to resign. It was an extraordinary setback.
MONDAY MAY 10
In the early hours, there were increasingly frantic calls between senior Lib Dem figures and their Labour friends. Brown’s allies were becoming exasperated by his vacillation. “You don’t understand what it’s like dealing with these bastards,” one Labour figure, who was acting as a go-between, told a Lib Dem frontbencher despairingly. “Gordon is just impossible.”
About 1.30am, Laws rang Ashdown. Brown had reneged on his earlier promise, he said. The prime minister seemed determined to cling on. Laws’s view was that there was now little hope of getting formal negotiations with Labour off the ground. Seeing his 30-year dream of a progressive alliance slipping away, Ashdown volunteered to ring his old friend Tony Blair, to see if he could resuscitate things.
He got hold of the former prime minister at 3am in the Middle East. According to well-placed sources, Ashdown told Blair that Brown was “poisoning” any prospect of a Lib-Lab deal. Ashdown was realistic, acknowledging that it was going to be extremely difficult to reach any agreement with Labour. There was no hope at all if Brown continued to dig in his heels.
Blair was frank. It is understood that he indicated to Ashdown that he was not sure it was in Labour’s interests to enter a fragile Lib-Lab coalition. Perhaps it was better to have a period in opposition, he said, and to let the Tories suffer the backlash over public service cuts. However, he agreed it was worth a try. He would ring Brown and would encourage him to say he would stand down by the autumn.
Cable had gone to bed late on Sunday and was startled to be awoken from a deep sleep at 6am. It was the prime minister on the line, in strangely jocular mood. He wanted to know what their parties were going to do. Cable was blunt, telling Brown he had to go, and go soon, if there was to be any chance of a Lab-Lib Dem deal. The prime minister grunted and hung up.
Acutely aware that Clegg’s patience was running out, Mandelson swung into action, telling Brown he must announce his resignation that afternoon. This unleashed a fast-moving chain of events.
At 1.30pm, Lib Dem MPs met. The majority wanted a deal with Labour. Clegg called Cameron, warning he might favour Labour unless the Tories improved their voting reform offer. Cameron tld the shadow cabinet he planned to offer a referendum on the alternative vote (AV) system. “Labour are offering AV without legislation,” he said. “If we don’t do this, the Liberals will go to Labour and it will happen anyway.”
At 5pm, Lib Dem peers met in a pro-Labour mood. Ashdown arrived brandishing a copy of a statement from Downing Street. It was the prime minister’s announcement — about to be broadcast live — that he would stand down by the time of the Labour party conference in November and that he was opening formal negotiations with the Lib Dems. The peers were euphoric, although Brown’s vacillation had cost valuable hours and goodwill, allowing the Lib-Con talks to gather momentum.
Conservative Central Office went into panic mode. Furious, Cameron rang Clegg to berate him. Why, when things seemed to have been going so well between their two teams, was he now officially starting to talk to Labour? Cameron played his final card, offering Clegg a referendum on AV. It was a huge risk on the Tory leader’s part, threatening uproar in his own party.
Brown called his cabinet together to explain that a negotiating team had been formed to talk to the Lib Dems. There was little dissent, according to one observer of the meeting. That night, however, the first formal talks between the Lib Dem and Labour negotiators did not go well. According to Lib Dem sources, while Mandelson did his best to be constructive — he reportedly even put the Trident nuclear deterrent into play — Harriet Harman, the deputy leader, appeared indifferent.
Balls and Ed Miliband, the environment secretary, were hostile. “They just didn’t seem prepared to move on anything. They wouldn’t talk about the Heathrow third runway,” said a Lib Dem. “They weren’t interested in what we wanted on schools... Ed Balls’s attitude was derisive.”
A Labour source retorted: “Chris Huhne could not bear to be in the same room as Ed Balls. There was no rapport.”
Unaware of how badly things were going for Labour, Cameron set out to sell his electoral reform concession to his shadow cabinet and Tory MPs. He won broad approval from shadow ministers — though there was dissent from Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, and Theresa May, the shadow work and pensions secretary. (Cameron’s subsequent revenge was far from even-handed: he demoted Grayling to junior pensions minister while making May home secretary.) At a heavily stage-managed meeting of the parliamentary party, a few rightwingers also objected but most MPs accepted Cameron’s warnings that, without the concession on AV, the Lib Dems would do a deal with Labour.
Afterwards Cameron and his team returned to his office in Norman Shaw South, the former New Scotland Yard, where an aide ordered pizza from Domino’s. The team sat eating margaritas and drinking Diet Coke while waiting to hear from the Lib Dems. They were dismayed when Ashdown appeared on television suggesting that his party’s deal with Labour might still be on. However, Ashdown was laying a false trail. In reality, reporting back to the parliamentary party at 10.30pm, Clegg was gloomy.
“I’m afraid the meeting with Labour was terrible,” he told them. “They had bad body language, bad attitudes. They seemed to be sneering... They don’t seem to be serious about dealing with us.”
The MPs were dismayed, pressing Clegg for more detail about the sticking point. Some with trade union backgrounds clung to the hope that this was simply the way in which the Labour party negotiated — hard and slow. But it seemed clear the game was now up. Two prominent MPs, Norman Baker and Don Foster, spoke out, saying the party had little choice now but to reach an agreement with the Tories. Then an emotional Cable stood up.
“I hate the Tories,” he said. “I have spent my whole life fighting them. But I think we could be quite influential if we go with the Tories.” According to colleagues, Cable, who had been working hard behind the scenes to keep the Lib-Lab deal alive for four days now, seemed devastated.
“You could see from his face that he felt betrayed,” one said. “He had tried terribly hard to keep Labour in play, and now they didn’t seem to be serious. He had been at his whiteboard, trying to figure it all out, numbers and so on, but he realised it was just not going to happen. I think he was gutted.”
Cable’s speech had a decisive effect on the MPs, who knew he had been pushing hard for the Lib-Lab deal. They agreed that there should be one final attempt to talk to Labour the next morning, but the mood was that there was no longer real chance of success. Soon word reached the Tory pizza vigil: Cameron was back in the game.
TUESDAY MAY 11
If a Lib-Lab pact had any life left in it, two of Labour’s former home secretaries, John Reid and David Blunkett, killed it by going in front of the cameras and declaring that the party would not accept it. One of Clegg’s aides rang Downing Street and asked: “Why are we only seeing Labour voices attacking the deal? Can’t you put up some people in support of co-operation?”
Labour claimed the Lib Dems were not serious. At their negotiations that morning, according to a Labour source, the Lib Dems “heaped impossible demands upon us. They wanted us to legislate for AV without a referendum and then also offer a referendum on full PR. They also demanded huge tax cuts. It was not a real negotiation. They had clearly made up their minds”.
The latest round of Lib-Con talks, by contrast, was going swimmingly. Differences over income tax and National Insurance were settled, and the Lib Dems agreed to the Tories’ plan for £6 billion in spending cuts this year. It was almost over.
In Downing Street, loyalists gathered in the afternoon as Brown prepared to resign. Martin Argles, a photographer who was allowed to record his last hours as prime minister, described the mood as “surprisingly light-hearted, but very, very tense”.
Gathered in the high-ceilinged “war room” at No 10 were Brown, his aides, Balls — Diet Coke in hand — Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, who had been helping to choreograph the fight for survival, and other core Labour figures.
Argles said: “They were all making jokes, repeating anecdotes about things that had happened, incidents on international visits such as mistaking diplomats for other people. They were very light little stories that they all knew and they all obviously enjoyed. So they were having quite a good time laughing, which was really just to keep the tension down, I think, while we were waiting for this phone call. Then it came. And there was silence. The whole place fell completely silent.”
Aides listening in on extension phones heard Clegg ask for more time while he consulted his party about the talks with the Tories. “Even at this stage, the Lib Dems were using us as leverage against the Tories,” one said. “They wanted to keep Gordon in the game, in the hope of extracting some last-minute concessions from Cameron, but Gordon had made his mind up.”
“Nick, Nick. I can’t hold on any longer,” Brown said. “Nick. I’ve got to go to the palace. The country expects me to do that. I have to go. The Queen expects me to go. I can’t hold on any longer.”
Argles photographed the scene as Brown’s young sons, John and James Fraser — for so long hidden from the public — came bounding into the room and left Downing Street hand-in-hand with him and their mother, Sarah. For the first and only time in his premiership, Brown suddenly revealed in public the relaxed and happy man he is said to be in private.
Word of what was unfolding inside No 10 had reached Cameron’s office, and he had made a call to his wife, warning her: “You’d better get here quickly — this could happen.”
She got to Westminster almost straight away and, within an hour, the two of them were driving to Buckingham Palace where the Queen asked Cameron to form a government. His first action as prime minister was to dismiss the motorcycle outriders that normally accompany new prime ministers on their journey from the palace to No 10.
“This was new politics and he was a coalition prime minister,” an aide said. “I do not think commuters would have appreciated him stopping the traffic in the Mall.”
In reality, he was a prime minister without a coalition. The Lib Dem parliamentary party was still meeting to decide whether formally to approve a deal with the Conservatives, and some of its key figures were deeply unhappy.
Ashdown, who was devastated by the death of his dream of a Lib-Lab pact, gave an emotional speech at the meeting. He wished Clegg well but made it clear he could not be part of the new project. This was an extremely painful moment for the former party leader. He said the Lib Dems had “abandoned the left” and risked ending up as a rump party. “I just can’t do this,” he told colleagues. “I’m off back to my garden and my grandchildren.”
But, after he sat down, copies of the proposed deal with the Tories were circulated at the meeting. Ashdown could not believe his eyes: there was concession after concession from the Conservatives.
He spoke again: “I’m not happy with where we’ve arrived. I’m not happy at the death of the realignment of the left. But I can see the logic of where we are. I’ve looked at his document. It’s amazing. F*** it! How can I stay out of this fight? You know I can’t resist a battle, especially in the company of my friends.”
There were gasps as other Lib Dems digested the document’s contents. The atmosphere was euphoric. “Will you be acting prime minister when Cameron goes on paternity leave?” one MP asked Clegg, to laughter.
Charles Kennedy and Menzies Campbell were still unconvinced. Kennedy pointed out that elections for the Scottish parliament loomed in 18 months’ time. He warned that the Lib Dems could pay a heavy price for the party north of the border, because of Tory unpopularity there.
The vote, however, was in favour. Politics and government in Britain might never be the same again.
The most senior figures in the party were privately telling friends the election was “going to be like 1992 — we’re going to do far better than people expect”. How wrong could they be?
It was day one of Britain’s May revolution when political tradition was turned on its head, constitutional convention was tossed aside, enemies became allies, a new generation seized power — and a widely reviled prime minister became human in the pathos of defeat.
The full story of the hung parliament of 2010 has yet to be told, but this is the first chapter: the inside account of what happened after the voters went to the polls on May 6 and plunged Britain’s political elite into crisis.
Strange secrets emerge. Who would have thought that the man who publicly ridiculed Gordon Brown as a cross between Stalin and Mr Bean was actually a backstairs confidant who had friendly fireside chats with him?
FRIDAY, MAY 7
The awful truth dawned on David Cameron, the Conservative leader, at about 3am. Over chilli con carne at his Oxfordshire home, he and his inner circle had remained bullish when the exit polls suggested the party would not get a majority in the House of Commons. They simply did not believe the figures.
But as he was driven back to London down the M40, crucial marginals on the Tory target list failed to fall. By the time Cameron reached his Millbank HQ, he realised the polls were right. He had not won a clear mandate to govern. Those close to him say he appeared dazed.
“He was barely functioning. His mind was whirring. All he could think was how, after five years of his change agenda, he could have failed?” said one.
Brilliantly adaptable, however, the Tory leader rapidly adjusted to the new landscape. He had a pressing problem: saving his own skin. He knew that his party disposed ruthlessly of those who led it to defeat — which meant himself and his closest ally, George Osborne, who had co-ordinated the campaign.
“Dave is the leader of Europe’s leading regicide specialists. He knew right away his bollocks were on the line. He had to think very quickly how he and George were going to get out of this alive,” an intimate said.
Instantly, insiders say, Cameron concluded that a coalition with the Liberal Democrats was the only way to safeguard his own position.
One said: “He thought a minority government would mean another election, probably within months. He knew he had misjudged this election campaign — and that was after five years of preparation. Everyone was saying that another election in the autumn would probably give us a decent majority, but he couldn’t see any reason why they’d necessarily do any better.
“A full coalition would protect him not only from the electorate, but from his own mutinous backbenchers, a lot of whom are furious about the way the campaign was handled.”
Cameron stayed at Millbank until dawn before crossing the river to the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge hotel, where he and Sam, his wife, had booked a suite. Sam stayed with him till 8am, when she returned to their North Kensington home, unable to sleep.
Gordon Brown, too, was calculating the odds on survival. He had summoned his team to his house near Edinburgh before going to his count at Kirkcaldy.
“He had seen the exit polls,” said one of those present, “but it was too soon to know if this would be a hung parliament or defeat for Labour.”
He joined local Labour activists holding a party at a Kirkcaldy hotel. When news came through that Labour had retaken nearby Dunfermline and West Fife from the Liberal Democrats, Brown punched the air and cried: “Yes!” He and his team boarded a charter jet at Edinburgh airport at about 3am, feeling nervous because many of the key results would come through in the next hour while they were in the air and unable to receive information. As they landed at Northolt, west London, they heard that Labour had retaken Rochdale — the home of Gillian Duffy, the “bigoted woman” of Brown’s biggest election gaffe — from the Lib Dems. There were cheers.
Brown went straight to Labour’s Victoria Street HQ in central London. After thanking the troops, he was briefed by the party’s two chief strategists, David Muir and Greg Cook (known as “Mystic Greg” because of his ability to predict election results accurately). It was clear that the Tories would get more than 300 seats. Labour would be the smaller party, but an alliance with the Lib Dems and other minor parties might be arithmetically feasible. Brown returned to No 10, defeated but not quite out of office, and went to sleep.
Nick Clegg was in a deep gloom as he boarded the first train from his Sheffield constituency to London shortly after dawn.The Lib Dem leader was in a state of shock at how his extraordinary popularity during the campaign had translated itself into a loss of parliamentary seats on election day. Final opinion polls had suggested that the Lib Dems were on the verge of an historic breakthrough, winning at least 75 seats, possibly as many as 90. He now faced humiliation with only 57.
Settling down next to his press secretary, Lena Pietsch, he rang his old mentor, Lord Ashdown. There was no time for dwelling on what might have been, the former special forces soldier told him briskly, he had to focus on the job in hand. Though the numbers were agonising, the Lib Dems still held the balance of power between the Tories and Labour. Clegg should begin drafting a statement honouring his public commitment to talk first to the party with the largest number of seats and biggest share of the vote — the Tories.
By the time the train pulled into St Pancras, Clegg had the outline ready. He was feeling better. At party HQ in Cowley Street, Westminster, he and Pietsch shut themselves in a room with John Sharkey, chairman of the campaign team, and Jonny Oates, a communications adviser, to work on the statement. Occasionally, they called Ashdown for advice.
The Lib Dems had three options: a coalition with the Tories or Labour, or a “confidence and supply” deal with the Tories — meaning that, in return for concessions on policy, they would sustain them in office without being coalition partners.
“Initially, everyone agreed that the one thing we did not want to do was have a Tory coalition,” said an insider who played a pivotal role in the negotiations. On the face of it, however, entering a coalition with Labour looked impossible. The numbers simply didn’t stack up. And so the party’s spin for the next battle was hammered out: the Lib Dems were “talking to the Tories and listening to Labour”.
Other calculating political minds were also at work. Immediately after Thursday night’s exit poll, Lord Mandelson and Alan Johnson, key Labour ministers, had hit the television studios to talk up the idea of a “progressive alliance” with the Lib Dems. They asked like-minded members of the cabinet — including Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, and Lord Adonis, the transport secretary — to call left-of-centre Lib Dems, including Simon Hughes, the former party president, and the former leaders Charles Kennedy and Sir Menzies Campbell. Shaun Woodward, the Northern Ireland secretary, was asked to square the various factions from the province to support a potential rainbow coalition.
After barely two hours’ sleep, Brown woke for a council of war with Mandelson, Adonis and other advisers. Sources who were with him in No 10 insist that at no point did he think he could continue in office indefinitely. However, that morning he believed he could remain as prime minister in a Lib-Lab coalition for about 18 months, to secure Britain’s recovery from recession. “Gordon genuinely believed and probably still believes that he was the right man to ensure Britain recovered from recession,” an aide said.
Adonis, a one-time Oxford politics lecturer, told Brown that a Lib-Lab coalition was not only viable but could offer stable government. Deliberations at No 10 were interrupted at 10.40am, however, by television pictures of Clegg on the steps of his headquarters, announcing that his party would open talks with the Tories.
Across the Thames, a cheer went up in Cameron’s hotel room where senior Tories were meeting. He had decided a plan of action. “We are going to have to make a full, open offer to the Liberal Democrats,” Cameron said. “We can’t go into this with a knife hidden behind our backs. A coalition is going to be the best option.”
In Downing Street, Mandelson and Brown decided to issue a statement at 4pm acknowledging the right of the Lib Dems and Conservatives to negotiate but pointing out that Labour was ready to talk if they failed. Not everyone was in favour. Ed Balls, Brown’s closest ally, arrived in No 10 to urge him not to hang around. It might be better to “go with dignity”.
When the Tories gave notice that Cameron would respond to Clegg at 2.30pm, “we brought forward our own statement to just after 1.30pm”, said a Brown aide. “It allowed us to pre-empt any claims that Gordon was ‘squatting’ in No 10 and get our offer out there to the Lib Dems ahead of Cameron.” The Tory leader’s statement had the bigger impact, however. The Lib Dems were taken aback by his “big, open and comprehensive” offer, which included many of the demands on the Lib Dem menu.
From Osborne’s second-floor corner office at Conservative headquarters, Cameron called Clegg to talk about it. An aide said: “We were all thinking about putting the family pictures back on the desk, thinking we were going to be in opposition for some time to come. But when Dave came out of George’s office, he was very positive. Already he and Nick were talking like old friends. They are both young men, with similar backgrounds. But what really drew them together is that they were both men in highly stressful situations.”
While Clegg and his team were delighted with the Tory offer, the Lib Dems’ old warhorses were sickened at the prospect of sleeping with the enemy. Emails whizzed back and forth between party grandees. Might a deal with Labour be possible instead? Several senior figures, among them Ashdown, Cable, Chris Huhne and Lord Rennard, a former chief executive of the party, thought it might.
They did some number-crunching and concluded that a Lib-Lab minority administration would be viable. They calculated that the smaller parties would be unlikely to join forces to topple it. This was a powerful bargaining tool for their talks with the Tories. There was mounting excitement at Lib Dem HQ. “We suddenly realised we could do a deal both ways.”
Cameron’s offer to the Lib Dems also provoked an immediate and furious response from his old guard. Rightwingers were repulsed at the thought of their leader courting Clegg and his “pinkos”. Alarmed, Cameron rang David Davis, his old rival for the Tory leadership, and a likely magnet for backbench discontent. He wanted to gauge from Davis just how big a problem he might have on his hands. An aide said: “He made noises about offering Davis a job. He wasn’t at all specific. Davis didn’t take it seriously.”
Davis was right not to. Privately, Cameron had told friends he would never trust the former shadow home secretary again, following his decision two years ago to quit his seat dramatically and trigger a by-election over civil liberties. But the Cameroons needed potentially dangerous figures in the party to feel loved. They made sure rumours began circulating in the media that Davis was being lined up for a job — possibly even the Home Office brief.
Direct talks with the Lib Dems began straightaway. The Lib Dem negotiators had been picked months earlier in expectation of a hung parliament. Among them was one of the Tories’ favourite Lib Dems, David Laws, a former banker and key contributor to the “Orange Book” that turned the party towards free-market economic policies. In the early years of the Cameron project, the Tories had hoped Laws might even defect. Osborne had made tentative approaches, but had been sent away with a flea in his ear.
Another negotiator, Danny Alexander, Clegg’s Scots chief of staff, is regarded by colleagues as smart, savvy and trusted by the leader. Huhne and Andrew Stunell, the other two figures on the team, are both seen by colleagues as canny operators. On the Tory side, when the two teams met for the first time that evening, were Osborne, William Hague, the former party leader, Oliver Letwin, the policy guru, and Ed Llewellyn, Cameron’s chief of staff.
Although this was an unprecedented meeting of political rivals who had lacerated each other during the election, they represented an elite with similar values and backgrounds. The Lib Dem negotiators were pleasantly surprised by how amenable Cameron’s group seemed. The Tories were careful not to patronise Clegg’s men.
The negotiators also soon found that they had an unexpected problem. They met in a room in the Cabinet Office with faulty central heating. It was so hot, everyone soon stripped down to shirtsleeves and took their ties off. The talks continued throughout in a subtropical atmosphere.
While the official Lib Dem team sweated, other senior members of the party were being contacted by Downing Street, where there had been consternation at the generosity of Cameron’s offer to the Lib Dems.
“We were genuinely surprised how much the Tories were prepared to compromise,” a Labour insider said. Brown had friends in high places among the Lib Dems. It now emerges that he had been secretly seeking Cable’s counsel since the credit crunch began. This is the same Cable who in November 2007, as Brown’s reputation as prime minister was plummeting, made the Commons howl with laughter at the jibe: “The house has noticed the prime minister’s remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean.”
Yet he had been invited to No 10 several times. According to Labour sources, these fireside chats were form of therapy for Brown, who trusted Cable implicitly. Cable, to his credit, has never spoken of them.
A source said: “Gordon would moan to Vince about how unfair everything was. It started quite soon after he became prime minister. He would call Vince in, ostensibly to discuss economics, but he wasn’t really looking for advice. I don’t think he wanted solutions, just someone to listen.”
During these conversations, the prime minister occasionally hinted that there was a job for Cable if he wanted it. “He did it in a slightly jokey, elliptical way, so there was no embarrassment on either side.”
In the run-up to the election, Brown had also been talking to Menzies Campbell, a friend for decades. Other highly discreet conversations had taken place between senior Lib Dems and Labour cabinet ministers. According to the Lib Dem camp, by the time the election was called, Labour appeared to be well “on side” to do a deal in the event of a hung parliament. Mandelson, at the heart of the contacts, had indicated he understood that Brown would have to resign for a deal to be done.
Midway through the election campaign, Clegg had publicly declared, in an interview with The Sunday Times, that he would not tolerate Brown “squatting” in No 10 if Labour lost the election. The animosity between the two men was ill-concealed, and now, on the afternoon after the election, Brown appeared reluctant to contact Clegg directly. But both Cable and Campbell encouraged him to do so, and that night he rang the Lib Dem leader.
It was not a comfortable conversation — though it was not exactly the angry exchange “laced with threats” that was later reported. According to one of Clegg’s close aides, “Nick did say that Gordon had just ranted down the phone, but it was not so much that Gordon was aggressive — more that he just wasn’t really listening. Gordon was talking at Nick, not to him. It was not really a two-way thing.”
SATURDAY MAY 8
As the country came to terms with the fact that there was no result to the election — no removal vans in Downing Street, no abrupt replacement of the prime minister and his government — the politicians grappled with the outcome, negotiating, manipulating, seeking advantage.
Mandelson sent a series of messages to Clegg, indicating that Brown was ready to resign. The business secretary seemed happy, apparently believing his vision of a Lib-Lab deal was very much on the cards.
Stung by accusations that he was squatting in No 10, Brown flew up to Scotland to get away from the oppressive atmosphere.
At the Lib-Con talks, the amiable Letwin was doing his best to find compromises — “Oliver, you’re turning into an honorary Lib Dem,” one of the Tory negotiators joked — but while the Tories surprised the Lib Dems with their open-mindedness, there was a potentially insurmountable problem: electoral reform. The Lib Dems were not going to be fooled by what they saw as a derisory promise of a “committee of inquiry” into voting change. The Tories indicated that was as far as they were prepared to go. Privately, however, Cameron prepared to improve his offer, driven by rumours of rival negotiations with Labour.
Late in the morning, Clegg addressed a morale-raising meeting of his MPs at Transport House, Smith Square, before joining Brown and Cameron at a Whitehall ceremony marking VE Day’s 65th anniversary. The body language of the three leaders was scrutinised but revealed nothing of what was going on behind the scenes.
Back at Transport House, Clegg’s 56 MPs were trapped inside by a noisy pro-PR demonstration. At one point Mike Hancock, the leftish MP for Portsmouth South, was thought to have flounced out in protest at a possible Tory deal. “He left the meeting because he needed a pee,” explained another MP. “We talked about whether we should have a sign that said ‘I’m leaving because I need a pee’ and hold it up at the window.”
The MPs endorsed Clegg’s strategy of focusing on the “national interest”. However, the clamour in the party for a proper deal on voting reform was becoming deafening. With the Tories apparently refusing to budge, it was clear that Clegg would have to step up communications with Labour.
That evening, after the party’s federal executive also endorsed Clegg’s strategy, Ashdown held an impromptu dinner party with other Lib Dem grandees. They met in the Prince of Wales pub in Kennington — just across the river from Westminster — before trooping back to his house. Over ready meals from Tesco, the mood was upbeat.
About the same time, Clegg and Cameron had a “constructive and amicable” 70-minute meeting in Admiralty House in Whitehall; but Clegg and the prime minister also spoke by phone during the evening at Brown’s request. They agreed that secret Lib-Lab talks should begin the following day. Wooed by both the Tories and Labour, the Lib Dems felt there was all to play for.
SUNDAY MAY 9
Brown discovered that the Lib Dem mood had hardened when he called Cable from Scotland at breakfast time, confirming he was willing to step down. To Brown’s surprise, Cable — not one for confrontation — made it clear that a vague promise of his departure would not be enough for formal talks to get under way. He would have to be specific. Brown was noncommittal. Later in the morning, a “preliminary” private meeting took place between the Lib Dem and Labour representatives.
Arriving back in London, Brown asked to see Clegg. They met for 75 minutes alone in the oak-panelled office of Sir Peter Ricketts, the permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office. Ricketts paced up and down in the corridor outside, saying: “Don’t mind me, I am just renting out my room. I am of no importance.” (A few days later, Cameron made him Britain’s first national security adviser.) Brown and Clegg had a follow-up telephone conversation in which the prime minister, unprompted, offered to step down. “I don’t want to get in the way of things,” he said.
“That’s very good of you,” replied Clegg.
For the first time, Brown put a date on his departure, volunteering to stand down in October. “I’ll stay as interim prime minister until then, but you can be the public face of the coalition,” he told Clegg, adding that he would focus on the economy. Hugely encouraged, Clegg arranged to speak to him again privately later that night.
During the day, the Tory and Lib Dem negotiating teams had appeared to make little progress in the heat of the Cabinet Office. The discussions lasted 6Å hours, but the Lib Dems demanded more Tory concessions on voting reform. It was a low point for Cameron who not only suspected the Lib Dems of two-timing but faced a party rebellion against the talks with them. He spent the evening at Westminster holding an open-door surgery for disgruntled MPs.
A Lib-Lab deal seemed a real prospect. Within hours, however, the picture was radically different. At midnight, Clegg spoke to Brown again. To his dismay, the prime minister had changed his tune. “I don’t want to go quickly. I will go at some point during the parliament,”he growled.
There were echoes of Tony Blair’s prevarication under pressure from Brown to resign. It was an extraordinary setback.
MONDAY MAY 10
In the early hours, there were increasingly frantic calls between senior Lib Dem figures and their Labour friends. Brown’s allies were becoming exasperated by his vacillation. “You don’t understand what it’s like dealing with these bastards,” one Labour figure, who was acting as a go-between, told a Lib Dem frontbencher despairingly. “Gordon is just impossible.”
About 1.30am, Laws rang Ashdown. Brown had reneged on his earlier promise, he said. The prime minister seemed determined to cling on. Laws’s view was that there was now little hope of getting formal negotiations with Labour off the ground. Seeing his 30-year dream of a progressive alliance slipping away, Ashdown volunteered to ring his old friend Tony Blair, to see if he could resuscitate things.
He got hold of the former prime minister at 3am in the Middle East. According to well-placed sources, Ashdown told Blair that Brown was “poisoning” any prospect of a Lib-Lab deal. Ashdown was realistic, acknowledging that it was going to be extremely difficult to reach any agreement with Labour. There was no hope at all if Brown continued to dig in his heels.
Blair was frank. It is understood that he indicated to Ashdown that he was not sure it was in Labour’s interests to enter a fragile Lib-Lab coalition. Perhaps it was better to have a period in opposition, he said, and to let the Tories suffer the backlash over public service cuts. However, he agreed it was worth a try. He would ring Brown and would encourage him to say he would stand down by the autumn.
Cable had gone to bed late on Sunday and was startled to be awoken from a deep sleep at 6am. It was the prime minister on the line, in strangely jocular mood. He wanted to know what their parties were going to do. Cable was blunt, telling Brown he had to go, and go soon, if there was to be any chance of a Lab-Lib Dem deal. The prime minister grunted and hung up.
Acutely aware that Clegg’s patience was running out, Mandelson swung into action, telling Brown he must announce his resignation that afternoon. This unleashed a fast-moving chain of events.
At 1.30pm, Lib Dem MPs met. The majority wanted a deal with Labour. Clegg called Cameron, warning he might favour Labour unless the Tories improved their voting reform offer. Cameron tld the shadow cabinet he planned to offer a referendum on the alternative vote (AV) system. “Labour are offering AV without legislation,” he said. “If we don’t do this, the Liberals will go to Labour and it will happen anyway.”
At 5pm, Lib Dem peers met in a pro-Labour mood. Ashdown arrived brandishing a copy of a statement from Downing Street. It was the prime minister’s announcement — about to be broadcast live — that he would stand down by the time of the Labour party conference in November and that he was opening formal negotiations with the Lib Dems. The peers were euphoric, although Brown’s vacillation had cost valuable hours and goodwill, allowing the Lib-Con talks to gather momentum.
Conservative Central Office went into panic mode. Furious, Cameron rang Clegg to berate him. Why, when things seemed to have been going so well between their two teams, was he now officially starting to talk to Labour? Cameron played his final card, offering Clegg a referendum on AV. It was a huge risk on the Tory leader’s part, threatening uproar in his own party.
Brown called his cabinet together to explain that a negotiating team had been formed to talk to the Lib Dems. There was little dissent, according to one observer of the meeting. That night, however, the first formal talks between the Lib Dem and Labour negotiators did not go well. According to Lib Dem sources, while Mandelson did his best to be constructive — he reportedly even put the Trident nuclear deterrent into play — Harriet Harman, the deputy leader, appeared indifferent.
Balls and Ed Miliband, the environment secretary, were hostile. “They just didn’t seem prepared to move on anything. They wouldn’t talk about the Heathrow third runway,” said a Lib Dem. “They weren’t interested in what we wanted on schools... Ed Balls’s attitude was derisive.”
A Labour source retorted: “Chris Huhne could not bear to be in the same room as Ed Balls. There was no rapport.”
Unaware of how badly things were going for Labour, Cameron set out to sell his electoral reform concession to his shadow cabinet and Tory MPs. He won broad approval from shadow ministers — though there was dissent from Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, and Theresa May, the shadow work and pensions secretary. (Cameron’s subsequent revenge was far from even-handed: he demoted Grayling to junior pensions minister while making May home secretary.) At a heavily stage-managed meeting of the parliamentary party, a few rightwingers also objected but most MPs accepted Cameron’s warnings that, without the concession on AV, the Lib Dems would do a deal with Labour.
Afterwards Cameron and his team returned to his office in Norman Shaw South, the former New Scotland Yard, where an aide ordered pizza from Domino’s. The team sat eating margaritas and drinking Diet Coke while waiting to hear from the Lib Dems. They were dismayed when Ashdown appeared on television suggesting that his party’s deal with Labour might still be on. However, Ashdown was laying a false trail. In reality, reporting back to the parliamentary party at 10.30pm, Clegg was gloomy.
“I’m afraid the meeting with Labour was terrible,” he told them. “They had bad body language, bad attitudes. They seemed to be sneering... They don’t seem to be serious about dealing with us.”
The MPs were dismayed, pressing Clegg for more detail about the sticking point. Some with trade union backgrounds clung to the hope that this was simply the way in which the Labour party negotiated — hard and slow. But it seemed clear the game was now up. Two prominent MPs, Norman Baker and Don Foster, spoke out, saying the party had little choice now but to reach an agreement with the Tories. Then an emotional Cable stood up.
“I hate the Tories,” he said. “I have spent my whole life fighting them. But I think we could be quite influential if we go with the Tories.” According to colleagues, Cable, who had been working hard behind the scenes to keep the Lib-Lab deal alive for four days now, seemed devastated.
“You could see from his face that he felt betrayed,” one said. “He had tried terribly hard to keep Labour in play, and now they didn’t seem to be serious. He had been at his whiteboard, trying to figure it all out, numbers and so on, but he realised it was just not going to happen. I think he was gutted.”
Cable’s speech had a decisive effect on the MPs, who knew he had been pushing hard for the Lib-Lab deal. They agreed that there should be one final attempt to talk to Labour the next morning, but the mood was that there was no longer real chance of success. Soon word reached the Tory pizza vigil: Cameron was back in the game.
TUESDAY MAY 11
If a Lib-Lab pact had any life left in it, two of Labour’s former home secretaries, John Reid and David Blunkett, killed it by going in front of the cameras and declaring that the party would not accept it. One of Clegg’s aides rang Downing Street and asked: “Why are we only seeing Labour voices attacking the deal? Can’t you put up some people in support of co-operation?”
Labour claimed the Lib Dems were not serious. At their negotiations that morning, according to a Labour source, the Lib Dems “heaped impossible demands upon us. They wanted us to legislate for AV without a referendum and then also offer a referendum on full PR. They also demanded huge tax cuts. It was not a real negotiation. They had clearly made up their minds”.
The latest round of Lib-Con talks, by contrast, was going swimmingly. Differences over income tax and National Insurance were settled, and the Lib Dems agreed to the Tories’ plan for £6 billion in spending cuts this year. It was almost over.
In Downing Street, loyalists gathered in the afternoon as Brown prepared to resign. Martin Argles, a photographer who was allowed to record his last hours as prime minister, described the mood as “surprisingly light-hearted, but very, very tense”.
Gathered in the high-ceilinged “war room” at No 10 were Brown, his aides, Balls — Diet Coke in hand — Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, who had been helping to choreograph the fight for survival, and other core Labour figures.
Argles said: “They were all making jokes, repeating anecdotes about things that had happened, incidents on international visits such as mistaking diplomats for other people. They were very light little stories that they all knew and they all obviously enjoyed. So they were having quite a good time laughing, which was really just to keep the tension down, I think, while we were waiting for this phone call. Then it came. And there was silence. The whole place fell completely silent.”
Aides listening in on extension phones heard Clegg ask for more time while he consulted his party about the talks with the Tories. “Even at this stage, the Lib Dems were using us as leverage against the Tories,” one said. “They wanted to keep Gordon in the game, in the hope of extracting some last-minute concessions from Cameron, but Gordon had made his mind up.”
“Nick, Nick. I can’t hold on any longer,” Brown said. “Nick. I’ve got to go to the palace. The country expects me to do that. I have to go. The Queen expects me to go. I can’t hold on any longer.”
Argles photographed the scene as Brown’s young sons, John and James Fraser — for so long hidden from the public — came bounding into the room and left Downing Street hand-in-hand with him and their mother, Sarah. For the first and only time in his premiership, Brown suddenly revealed in public the relaxed and happy man he is said to be in private.
Word of what was unfolding inside No 10 had reached Cameron’s office, and he had made a call to his wife, warning her: “You’d better get here quickly — this could happen.”
She got to Westminster almost straight away and, within an hour, the two of them were driving to Buckingham Palace where the Queen asked Cameron to form a government. His first action as prime minister was to dismiss the motorcycle outriders that normally accompany new prime ministers on their journey from the palace to No 10.
“This was new politics and he was a coalition prime minister,” an aide said. “I do not think commuters would have appreciated him stopping the traffic in the Mall.”
In reality, he was a prime minister without a coalition. The Lib Dem parliamentary party was still meeting to decide whether formally to approve a deal with the Conservatives, and some of its key figures were deeply unhappy.
Ashdown, who was devastated by the death of his dream of a Lib-Lab pact, gave an emotional speech at the meeting. He wished Clegg well but made it clear he could not be part of the new project. This was an extremely painful moment for the former party leader. He said the Lib Dems had “abandoned the left” and risked ending up as a rump party. “I just can’t do this,” he told colleagues. “I’m off back to my garden and my grandchildren.”
But, after he sat down, copies of the proposed deal with the Tories were circulated at the meeting. Ashdown could not believe his eyes: there was concession after concession from the Conservatives.
He spoke again: “I’m not happy with where we’ve arrived. I’m not happy at the death of the realignment of the left. But I can see the logic of where we are. I’ve looked at his document. It’s amazing. F*** it! How can I stay out of this fight? You know I can’t resist a battle, especially in the company of my friends.”
There were gasps as other Lib Dems digested the document’s contents. The atmosphere was euphoric. “Will you be acting prime minister when Cameron goes on paternity leave?” one MP asked Clegg, to laughter.
Charles Kennedy and Menzies Campbell were still unconvinced. Kennedy pointed out that elections for the Scottish parliament loomed in 18 months’ time. He warned that the Lib Dems could pay a heavy price for the party north of the border, because of Tory unpopularity there.
The vote, however, was in favour. Politics and government in Britain might never be the same again.
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