Whoever moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes
There are times when politicians encapsulate a feeling among the voters in ways which can be vastly influential
In choosing to write about politicians rising above the dust of the everyday arena and capturing the public mood, I am not seeking to throw shade at the current prime minister or her government, or make sly and disobliging comparisons with an administration which is struggling. It is, believe it or not, a coincidence of time, and relates much more to the ongoing research and thinking I’ve been doing in putting together a volume on oratory in the House of Commons (yes! I’m writing a book! etc.).
It is often observed that we are living in a time of rather dull and leaden public exposition, with phrases dulled by the need for short soundbites and perhaps a pervasive cynicism in the common weal making us unresponsive to or sceptical of high-sounding rhetoric. There is some truth in that. It is a particularly acute problem in the UK: in the United States, as we saw during the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, there is still an appetite for inspirational speeches and ringing phrases which look to the horizon, outlining great principles and ideals rather than simply speaking commonly and plainly of everyday politics. Obama was indeed a master of this art: his first major national speech, when he addressed the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004, electrified an audience, both in the hall and watching on television, who had never heard of the young Illinois state senator before.
If we look to find counterparts in the more humdrum milieu of British politics, the search is more demanding. Tony Blair’s speech at the TUC Congress in 2001, when he responded to the very recent terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC, was an important occasion on which Blair pledged his support for America and his determination to join the campaign against Islamic fundamentalism, and Blair, a better platform speaker than a debater in the House of Commons, produced words of weight, dignity and import. He concluded with brave, resonant remarks.
This is not a battle between the United States of America and terrorism, but between the free and democratic world and terrorism. We therefore, here in Britain, stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy. And we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.
It is hard for some people to remember as far back as the early 2000s and the days before military action against Iraq, which, for many, forever marred his reputation. But on that day, as the world reeled in shock, he understood the momentous nature of what had happened, and saw very clearly how he needed to position the United Kingdom alongside its US allies.
I am perhaps unusual, or at least unfashionable, in holding David Cameron in considerable regard. I did not deal with him much in professional terms, but I think he was and remains a well-intentioned and public-spirited man, not without faults, but representative—and here I am especially out of sympathy with modern thought—of the best kind of well-bred noblesse oblige. He was typical of the old Tory gentry: although he was born in London, he felt and looked effortlessly comfortable in his rural constituency of Witney; his father came from a landowning family in Aberdeenshire and his mother was descended from the Mount baronets of Berkshire; and Cameron himself would perhaps have been entirely at home as a county MP of the 18th or early 19th century.
Here is not the place to wrangle over Cameron’s political legacy, which some can now only see through the prism of the referendum on membership of the European Union (which, we should remember, he was quite confident would be won by the Remain side and would therefore put to bed the issue of Europe for a generation). What I do want to argue, however, is that Cameron had a nebulous, almost mystical instinct for the feelings of the broad mass of the electorate, and there were occasions when this gift allowed him, as if by a sixth sense, to capture and define the public mood. It was not an unerring ability, but when it was in evidence, it was a powerful personal quality.
The first example I would cite came in 2010 after the inconclusive result of the general election. Gordon Brown’s Labour Party suffered considerable losses, shedding nearly 100 seats to number only 258 MPs in the new House of Commons; but the Conservatives, while rising from 193 to 306 seats, lacked an overall majority. The Liberal Democrats surged to their best result ever, with 57 MPs, also the strongest showing for a third party since the 1930s, and it was obvious as soon as the arithmetic was known that they would be key players, and likely kingmakers, in the new parliament.
While Labour trailed the Conservatives, Gordon Brown was within his constitutional rights to remain as prime minister and attempt to pursue an arrangement with other parties which might allow him to stay in power. A Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition was prima facie the obvious outcome, as both parties were more or less leftist or progressive, though the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, had maintained his predecessors’ stance of “equidistance” between the two main parties: in theory, therefore, he had no preference between the Conservatives and Labour. Brown therefore set his cap at a deal with the Liberal Democrats to deny the Conservatives power (though even their combined strength would have left them 11 seats short of an overall majority), and, rather than resigning on the day after the election, as defeated prime ministers traditionally had done, he stayed in Downing Street, advised on issues of constitutional propriety by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, and the Private Secretary to the Sovereign, Sir Christopher Geidt.
If observers felt there was any inevitability to a Labour/Liberal Democrat deal, looking back to the close relationship of the early Blair years and to the agreements which had sustained the Callaghan government in 1977-78, they were mistaken. Brown’s offering to the Liberal Democrats seemed grudging and niggardly, and on Monday 10 May, four days after the election, he made the last-ditch move of offering to resign as leader of his party if it would allow the Liberal Democrats to join Labour under a different premier. Alan Johnson, the popular and affable Home Secretary, was mooted as an alternative, but the proposed union still felt fragile: on Channel 4, the doyen of Whitehall historians, Professor Peter Hennessy, described it as containing “too many moving parts.” Seeing no hope of success, Gordon Brown went to the Palace the following day, Tuesday 11 May, to resign.
Meanwhile the Conservatives had not been idle, but were engaging actively with the Liberal Democrat leadership. It seemed an unlikely marriage. The Liberal Democrats had become arch-enemies of the Conservatives at a local level, and had taken several safe seats from them at by-elections since the doldrums of the Major government. But there were underlying causes for hope: Clegg himself was a relatively centrist figure, far removed from the left-wing activism of parts of his party, and was advised by several so-called “Orange Book” Liberals who believed in personal freedom, the importance of market forces and reform of major institutions like the NHS. Clegg was a relative novice in Westminster terms, too, having only been elected in 2005 and therefore not steeped in anti-conservatism to the same degree as some of his colleagues.
The major, and decisive, factor, however, was David Cameron’s political antennae and his sense of what might be possible. Although he was tribally Tory, he thought of himself in the moderate “One Nation” tradition of the party, and he was extremely comfortable in his own skin. He first spoke to Nick Clegg by telephone on the afternoon of Friday 7 May, and the conversation was constructive. The men had much in common. They were only a few months apart in age, both were married to impressive, successful and glamorous women, both had young families, and both had public school and Oxbridge backgrounds (Cameron was Eton and Oxford, Clegg Westminster and Cambridge).
Cameron perceived more quickly than anyone else that something had changed as a result of the general election, that the electorate had delivered a nuanced and complex verdict on the parties and the political system as a whole, and that previously implausible outcomes might now be imagined. He decided not to fight over small details or minor arrangements, and instead announced, “I want to make a big, open and comprehensive offer to the Liberal Democrats. I want us to work together in tackling our country's big and urgent problems—the debt crisis, our deep social problems and our broken political system.”
This mentality was the decisive factor in sealing the support of the Liberal Democrats and creating a government which might survive a full term. He understood that the public felt that politics was in some senses “broken”, with the challenges which faced the UK transcending individual parties and requiring a more imaginative set of solutions. Cameron’s offer was therefore a formal coalition, based on a written agreement and including ministerial and cabinet posts for Liberal Democrats, something a third party had not achieved since the Second World War. Clegg was to be Deputy Prime Minister with four other Liberal Democrats joining him in the cabinet; there would be other ministers in the junior ranks; and the coalition agreement offered progress on some of the party’s most cherished ambitions such as electoral reform.
It seems unlikely that any other Conservative leader could have achieved this realignment and pulled the party back into power for the first time in 13 years. David Davis, whom Cameron had defeated in the leadership election in 2005, was far more pugnacious and partisan a figure (although his commitment to personal freedom gave him some common ground with the Liberal Democrats), and Cameron’s easygoing good nature seemed to be the glue which held the arrangement together. It will be recorded, I believe, as one of his most significant achievements.
Cameron’s second moment of inspiration and daring came later that year. In June 2010, the Saville Inquiry, which had since 1998 scrutinised the events in Londonderry of 30 January 1972, Bloody Sunday, finally reported. It had been an enormously laborious and exhaustive process (indeed, I had applied for a job with the inquiry after graduation, and was a clerk of five years’ standing by the time it concluded). The inquiry had been established by Tony Blair as part of the Northern Ireland peace process, Bloody Sunday having been a running sore for nationalists for nearly 30 years, but it had attracted some controversy. Although it was widely agreed that Lord Widgery’s original 1972 tribunal had been a hasty whitewash intended to exonerate the British Army of any wrongdoing, some Unionists felt that Saville was under pressure to favour the Nationalist side, and had engaged in cherry-picking evidence to demonise the actions of the security forces.
Bloody Sunday had occurred under a Conservative government, of course, and the party still wore its “Conservative and Unionist” label with pride; the Ulster Unionist MPs at Westminster had only stopped taking the Conservative whip after the day in question. There was a tendency among Conservatives to defend the armed forces loyally almost to the point of blindness, and any hint of the involvement of the Provisional IRA was still seen as a a condemnation of what the protestors in Londonderry had been doing.
By 2010, the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was 12 years old. There was a functional power-sharing assembly in Belfast and a cross-community executive was led jointly by First Minister Peter Robinson of the DUP and deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin. This had come out of the 2006 St Andrews Agreement which had jump-started devolution, and Northern Ireland was, in its own, cramped, tentative, suspicious way, edging towards political normality.
Again it was David Cameron who, having received the 10-volume report from Lord Saville of Newdigate, sensed the prevailing mood in the country, the sensitivities around the result of the inquiry and the implications for how it was received. On 15 June 2010, there was a commemorative march through Londonderry to the Guildhall, where families of the victims were given advance copies of the titanic document. In London, Cameron made a statement to the House of Commons, and he pulled no punches nor shirked any inherited or residual responsibility.
I remember watching the Prime Minister’s statement. The House was in a sombre mood, but there was a mixture of anxiety and sensitivity. The 38-year-old wound had, surely, to be healed and reconciliation achieved, and genuine sympathy offered to those who had lost loved ones, yet many traditional Conservatives would not have reacted well to a self-flagellating mea culpa. In fact Cameron judged the atmosphere to perfection.
He began by deftly and sensitively acknowledging the profound feelings on both sides.
I am deeply patriotic; I never want to believe anything bad about our country; I never want to call into question the behaviour of our soldiers and our Army, which I believe to be the finest in the world. And I have seen for myself the very difficult and dangerous circumstances in which we ask our soldiers to serve. But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear: there is no doubt; there is nothing equivocal; there are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong.
That was essential. There was no equivocation, no special pleading, no weasel words: the deaths of 14 unarmed civilians in Londonderry on 30 January 1972 had been indefensible. He continued by saying that the soldiers of 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, should not have engaged the protestors in the way they did, he affirmed that British soldiers had fired the first shots and that none of those killed had been in possession of a firearm. This neatly and comprehensively dismantled most of the excuses which had been advanced by defenders of the Army ever since the day itself.
Cameron emphasised that defending the actions of 1 PARA was in no way a defence of the Army as a whole or the politics of the British state.
These are shocking conclusions to read and shocking words to have to say, but we do not defend the British Army by defending the indefensible. We do not honour all those who have served with distinction in keeping the peace and upholding the rule of law in Northern Ireland by hiding from the truth. So there is no point in trying to soften, or equivocate about, what is in this report. It is clear from the tribunal’s authoritative conclusions that the events of Bloody Sunday were in no way justified.
His final and essential gesture was to apologise. “The Government are ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces, and for that, on behalf of the Government—indeed, on behalf of our country—I am deeply sorry.” While one can argue endlessly over the value of historical apologies, in this case it was absolutely the right thing to do. An admission of fault and contrition had been at the heart of the families’ demands for decades, and Cameron’s decision to be explicit left no doubt as to his feelings: the British state, nearly 40 years ago in 1972, had committed a terrible error, an avoidable error and a culpable error, and he, as the chief minister of that British state, was sorry without qualification.
It was a moment of importance that is difficult to overstate. While extremist Republicans will still hark back to the killings of Bloody Sunday, the Saville Report and Cameron’s official apology drew much of the sting of that day for moderate, mainstream politicians. No longer did the British government hint or suggest that the Army had been justified, or even somehow excused, in killing 14 unarmed civilians. While the report explained in great depth what had gone wrong, the narrative was clear, humble and contrite.
I believe passionately that these two political events of 2010 were massively important instances of David Cameron catching the mood of the electorate and the political community. In both cases, he realised, as very few others had done, that it was no longer “business as usual”, that these circumstances transcended everyday politics and needed extraordinary empathy and consideration. He was setting himself above party, in some ways, assuming the responsibilities of the head of government, and demonstrating that he was a national figure as well as a routinely partisan one.
Political imagination and creativity are rare. Blair undoubtedly possessed both qualities, while Brown, his eventual successor, did not to any real measure. Cameron also “got it”, as he would later tell the House of Commons over the proposal to bomb Syria, and that grasp of realities allowed him to help the country through difficult times.
Readers might ask an obvious question as to whether any of our current leaders possess that same sense of vision. I am not sure. It is hard to see any frontbenchers at the moment who exhibit the imagination to transform politics or see and respond to seismic shifts in public opinion. There might be one: you will think “He would say this, wouldn’t he?”, and I make no apology for my admiration for her, but, watching Penny Mordaunt pay tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II at the Conservative Party conference recently, I discerned a hint of the same frame of mind. In her moving and eloquent speech, she spoke of George VI as the nation’s “balance wheel”. Of the Queen, she said that “her gift was calmness, confidence, courage. She enabled us to stay the course.” This seemed to me to capture the essence of what so many people had felt about Elizabeth and had tried, however haltingly, to articulate in the days after her death. And she observed that “crowns are not made of precious metals and jewels alone. They are mostly made of duty and love.”
This seemed to me then, and seems now, to show some of the inclusive spirit and sense of national occasion that I have described in Blair and Cameron. It is hard to demonstrate, and impossible to counterfeit. I would like to think that she can continue to reveal to us what we are already somehow thinking, and to sum up our collective emotions when we need it most.