Cameron at 10: From Election to Brexit. Anthony Seldon

one of which contains Gaddafi, who then hides in a drainage pipe. He is taken prisoner, wounded but alive. By the time he reaches Misrata he is dead. On 21 October, NATO announces that operations in Libya will cease ten days later.28

      Sarkozy and Cameron have a private understanding that neither will visit Libya without the other. Even though the fighting is not yet over, a date for their joint expedition is fixed for 15 September. In Number 10, the visit is a closely guarded secret. The evening before, Cameron is driven from his constituency to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. After dinner and a short sleep in military accommodation, the two leaders fly in the early hours in an RAF C-17 Globemaster aircraft. Gabby Bertin carries a Union Jack in her handbag, given to her the day before by the Foreign Office to fly at the British Embassy in Tripoli, which had been looted and burnt earlier in the year.29 The military are worried about ground-to-air missiles, with a secure military presence on the ground yet to be established. The French military protection ring around them is exceptionally heavy.

      After months of strain, Cameron is boyishly excited: ‘He really, really, really thinks he has done the right thing,’ says an aide on the flight. He and Sarkozy are all but mobbed by the hysterical crowds. They all want to see and touch them. In Benghazi, they speak to a crowd of several thousands. Cameron is alert to the dangers of hubris: he is anxious to avoid Bush’s mistake when he announced in May 2003, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, an end of major combat operations in Iraq (the infamous ‘Mission accomplished’ speech). It is nevertheless Cameron’s most exciting day so far as prime minister. That evening, back in London, he speaks at a political dinner at the Carlton Club. His message is that the Conservative Party must be unambiguously on the side of the most vulnerable.30 There is to be no Thatcherite triumphalism, as when she told the press outside Downing Street on 25 April 1982 to ‘Rejoice!’ after British troops landed on South Georgia at the outset of the Falklands War.

      Libya is the formative experience for Cameron in his premiership to date. He feels vindicated, and his self-confidence is initially boosted. Rose-tinted spectacles have been removed from his eyes about fellow world leaders. He cannot rely fully on Obama, nor Merkel, and Sarkozy’s ego knows no bounds. But equally, he learns how to build a coalition of foreign leaders, and sustain it, even in adverse circumstances. The future of the Libya story will, he recognises, be down to the Libyans themselves, and to their ability to form a stable government. He is cautiously optimistic – too optimistic, it turns out. Libya is not to be the success that the Falklands War was for Thatcher. He invested much personal capital in Libya. But from 2013 the situation in the country deteriorates gradually before ‘falling apart’ from the autumn of 2014. Cameron has learnt how difficult it is to unseat even the most capricious overseas leaders, and how hard it is to change the status quo: to do so requires him to drive the change himself, because the military and diplomatic establishment is inherently conservative; he is more sceptical of the MoD and the service chiefs than he was before the Libya episode. At the conclusion of hostilities, in an attempt to show that there are no hard feelings, he presents Richards with a signed photograph, and a first edition of T. E. Lawrence’s book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It is not the last of their battles. Syria is to come.

TEN

       AV Referendum: Coalition Buckles

      January–May 2011

      ‘If you wanted a formula to maximise the prospects of the coalition falling apart, decide at the outset to select an issue of existential importance, ensuring that it will be seen as vital to both parties, then say you will conduct a debate in public on its implementation with both parties being on different sides: you will then have your formula for disaster.’1 This is the prediction of Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell, whose job it is to oversee the smooth conduct of the virgin coalition government. The dynamite charge he envisages is a vote on introducing electoral reform in the form of the Alternative Vote (AV), which is duly enshrined in the Coalition Agreement.

      Electoral reform is of fundamental importance to the Lib Dems. Since their replacement by Labour in the 1920s as one of the two main parties in Britain’s two-party system, they have believed that only proportionality would address their historic problem as the third party: the proportion of votes they receive at elections translates into only a pitifully small percentage of seats in Parliament. While a form of proportional representation has long been their preferred system, they agree to AV, which asks voters to rank candidates in order of preference to ensure that the winner receives over 50% of the vote. Although Lib Dems believe AV to be an improvement on first-past-the-post, which has long been Britain’s method of choosing MPs, it is not the proportional system they crave. To the Cameron team in the first few weeks of coalition, the implications of any successful AV referendum seem a long, long way away. The immediate concern in those warm May days is binding the Lib Dems into a government to ensure that their own favoured policies, including Plan A, would thus be enacted.

      When Cameron sees Conservative MPs on 10 May 2010 in House of Commons Committee Room 14, he tells them that electoral reform is the minimum price that the Lib Dems are demanding for agreeing to come into a coalition government. The chief whip, Patrick McLoughlin, acknowledges that there was ‘very little dissent’ about it at that meeting.2 That evening, William Hague, who is leading negotiations, offers Lib Dems a national referendum on AV, which will form a cornerstone of the Coalition Agreement. He knows that AV is the biggest single gamble in the Coalition Agreement. If the country votes in favour of it, it will change politics forever.3 Like all in Cameron’s team, insofar as he thinks through the implications at all, he assumes that AV will be rejected in a referendum and that it will be a necessary inconvenience.

      The clear understanding of the coalition negotiators is that the Conservatives and the Lib Dems will campaign on opposite sides of the argument, but that they will do so in a dignified way, as becoming of ‘Rose Garden’ partners. That at least is what the Tory negotiators think is agreed. The Lib Dems have gleaned a different understanding: that Cameron will not himself lead from the front, and that as PM, he will maintain an Olympian distance above the troops slugging it out on the ground. The following weeks give no cause for concern. Nick Clegg is reassured by Michael Gove’s hands-off, even indifferent, attitude to the result of the referendum. Julian Astle, Clegg’s special adviser, is working on the understanding that the Tory leadership will let AV ‘go’ to focus on other matters.4 One of Clegg’s senior policy aides agrees: ‘Cameron’s personal view was that he didn’t really give a damn. AV is not a massive change to the first-past-the-post system. His view was, “Nick, you and I, we’ll just stay out of the fray on this one.”’ Indeed some leading Conservatives, like Gove, are actively considering coming out and supporting AV.5 In the second half of 2010 every poll indicates that the ‘No’ side will win. Cameron has reason to be laid-back. In January 2011, a high point in Conservative/Lib Dem harmony, the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act is passed by 320 votes to 234, which means that unless there are exceptional circumstances, general elections will be held every five years in Britain and no longer at the whim of the prime minister. At the first Conservative conference at Birmingham, AV is barely mentioned.6 George Osborne is in unashamedly pugilistic form, picking up a ‘No to AV’ sticker from a conference stall, albeit placing it on the inside of his lapel.7

      December sees the first harbingers of problems. A Guardian/ICM poll at the beginning of the month puts ‘Yes’ on 44% but ‘No’ on only 38%.8 The New Year in 2011 brings a chill wind to Number 10. The Coulson