For the Record

Then Nick Clegg appeared briefly on the TV. He had led his party to new heights in the polls, and then, as I have said, lost seats. Still – and politics can be so strange like this – he found himself holding the balance of power. He stayed true to what he had said before the election: that if there was a hung Parliament he would talk first to the party with the largest number of seats. The door to power opened a crack.

Soon afterwards, the actual door to power – the big, black one with ‘10’ on it – was flung open and Gordon Brown came out into Downing Street. He was ready, he said, to talk to the Lib Dems once they had spoken to us. I had thought that he would in some way concede that Labour had lost the election, and set the scene for his departure. George laughed at the suggestion: Brown, he said, would have to be prised out of No. 10 as he clung to the railings by his fingernails. He was right.

Fortunately, some of the spadework for a possible coalition with the Lib Dems had already been done. Before the election I had sanctioned George to compare our manifestos and prepare the ground for a deal with the potential kingmakers alongside my chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn. Diminutive and quietly spoken, Ed derived his authority from his intellect, decency and experience, having been chief of staff to Chris Patten in Hong Kong before the handover, and to Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia after the war.

They would work on this with Oliver Letwin, the West Dorset MP and the party’s policy chief. Oliver was kind, endearing and clever. He may have looked like an old-fashioned Tory MP, with red corduroy trousers and matching complexion, but no one had been more influential in helping me develop my brand of ‘modern, compassionate conservatism’ over the past five years.

I hadn’t taken part in any of the coalition preparation. I wanted to be single-minded about winning, and not to dissemble if people asked me what I had done to prepare for a coalition.

A huge amount would rest on the speech I would give, and we chose St Stephen’s Club as the venue. Commentators made much of the fact that overlooking me was a portrait of Winston Churchill, the last prime minister to lead a coalition, in his case during the Second World War. But it was the ghost of another great PM, the club’s first patron, Benjamin Disraeli, whose presence I really felt.

‘England does not love coalitions,’ Disraeli famously said. In many ways, I agreed. I had made endless speeches about supporting our electoral system because it produced decisive results and strong governments. In Europe it often took months to form a government – months of political instability that recession-battered Britain could not afford. But I felt that, given our circumstances, coalition really was the right choice – and I believed I could make it work.

I stepped up to the lectern to make my pitch. A strong, stable government that had the support of the public to take the difficult decisions was, I said, needed to put the country back on track. I didn’t use the word ‘coalition’ – I didn’t have to. It was clear that a coalition was on the table from the fact that I specifically talked about going beyond a confidence and supply deal.

I went through the key elements of the Lib Dem manifesto, and set out where we could ‘give ground’ and ‘change priorities’, giving prominence to cutting carbon emissions, raising the tax threshold for the lowest-paid and speeding up the introduction of a ‘pupil premium’, so schools with children from the poorest homes would receive more money. I indicated that we were also open to political and constitutional reform, which was hugely important to the Lib Dems, who had long campaigned for changes to the voting system.

The approach was generous and front-footed. We were making concessions before discussions had even started – and we were doing so in public.

I phoned Nick Clegg from our party’s base, now known as Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ). He was keen to progress. He told me his four negotiators, and I named mine. William Hague had morphed from a much-caricatured party leader into a heavy­weight shadow foreign secretary and an indispensable sage in my inner team. He would be joined by George Osborne, Ed Llewellyn and Oliver Letwin, making up the perfect quartet to secure a deal.

The first talks took place that evening in the Cabinet Office at 70 Whitehall – tantalisingly, tauntingly close to 10 Downing Street, where Gordon Brown was still holding firm. It was a key decision not to include civil servants in the discussions, as we thought that would enable us to get a deal without getting lost in problems and details.

Ed would call and update me with his usual cloak-and-dagger whispers that I could only half-hear. It turned out the Lib Dem team was pleasantly surprised by our concessions, and our team was pleasantly surprised at their willingness to go for a full coalition.

From then on there was a permanent pack outside 70 Whitehall: cameras, reporters, protesters, and the odd bemused tourist. The world was watching too. The pound had plummeted that day to a one-year low, and the markets wanted reassurance.

It was like waiting for a new Pope. When would the next signal come? What colour would the smoke be? Blue and yellow? Red and yellow? I had absolutely no idea.

The next morning, Saturday, I woke up at our home in North Kensington feeling positive. I weaved through the throng of cameras outside my house and went to buy the papers from the local shop. ‘Squatter Holed Up in No. 10’, said the Sun, depicting Brown as a fifty-nine-year-old man refusing to leave the central London property.

In an awkward twist, I came face-to-face with Brown and Clegg later that day as we marked the anniversary of VE Day. It was sixty-five years since the veterans lining Whitehall in their berets and bowler hats had liberated Europe and democracy had triumphed. And here the three of us were, the embodiment of democracy in its messiest form. As a testament to the confusion, some of the veterans even greeted me as ‘Prime Minister’.

Before we were led to the Cenotaph to lay our wreaths, Brown started to engage Clegg about the discussions they had clearly already begun over the telephone. It felt inappropriate. ‘He’s still having a go at me,’ Clegg whispered to me.

Our own conversation came later in the day. It wouldn’t be our first interaction. Purely by accident, we had a good talk at the opening ceremony of the new Supreme Court in 2009. While Brown and the Queen undertook the formalities, Nick and I talked politics, families and life. He was only three months younger than me, and our lives were very similar. We shared a liberal outlook and an easy manner. I left thinking, what a reasonable, rational, decent guy.

As we sat down that Saturday night in a dingy room in Admiralty House, one of the government buildings on Whitehall, we discussed how we’d given the press the slip. Underground car park, I said. Switching cars outside the Home Office, he said.

We went through our two manifestos, and talked about compromises. But the detail was for the negotiators. For us, it was about the bigger picture – and it was about trust. We agreed that we could and should work together. There was a mutual recognition that we would both be judged forever on whether we could make something unprecedented work at a time when our nation needed it most.

We were both taking a big risk. For me, the risk would be angering those in my party who would not tolerate being in coalition, and might turn against me. But given the history of coalitions for minor parties, he was taking a greater risk.

‘If we go for this I’ll make it work,’ I said to him. ‘I’ll make the deal a success, and I’ll make it last.’ I meant it, and I think he could see that.

Not only were the negotiations going well, but I felt confident in our position. If anyone had won the election, we had. We were the open ones, the democratic ones, the ones who were reading the national mood and responding to the public’s wishes. A full coalition remained the lead option. A confidence and supply deal was just a fallback. That’s why my mood the next day, Sunday, was calm.

Because I wasn’t in the negotiating team, I tried to do some of the ordinary things I would do on a Sunday to get a sense of normality back into my life. I played tennis. I went shopping. I cooked for Sam and the kids while getting updates from that day’s negotiations.

The updates were relatively reassuring. Crucially, it seemed the Lib Dems were willing to support a programme of spending cuts, including immediate ones. Without that, it would have been hard to form a stable government with clear purpose. The Budget affects every policy decision, and you have to see eye-to-eye on that. But given their voter base among public-sector workers, particularly in education, this willingness would damage the Lib Dems enormously.

In the early stages, the decisions for us weren’t as difficult. We dropped our pledge to cut inheritance tax, something we could reluctantly but easily sacrifice. The hard stuff was still to come.

With things going well, I held a drop-in session for MPs. Some were less than keen on the idea of coalition. A group of backbench Tory MPs who tended to be on the anti-modernising end of the spectrum – I referred to them as ‘the usual suspects’, because you were never surprised if they rejected any move to modernise, or rebelled on votes in Parliament – urged me to go into minority government and call a general election as soon as possible. Others simply said I should let the opposition parties form a rainbow coalition. I was undeterred: a full coalition was the right thing to do.

But when I met Clegg in my office that evening, something had changed. Though the negotiations were progressing, voting reform remained an obstacle. I had been offering an inquiry, but that wasn’t enough for the Lib Dems, and the teams were now talking about the whole deal only in terms of confidence and supply. Perhaps that was the best we could do. I signed off on the wording of such a deal that Sunday night.

Then, at 11 p.m. I called Clegg from my Commons office. He’d had a meeting with the prime minister. Brown had made an offer on voting reform – to hold a referendum on implementing the Alternative Vote (AV) system, a sort of halfway house between the current first-past-the-post system and full proportional representation, where voters would rank candidates. AV did avoid the biggest problems with PR. Under it, every constituency would still have an MP, and every MP a constituency. But my party would find it extremely hard to stomach, and so would I. Most importantly, I didn’t think the public wanted it either.

However, I realised that if we were asking the Lib Dems to make a political move they wouldn’t have imagined possible, we would have to consider things we didn’t imagine possible. Legislating directly for AV, of course not. But a referendum? That might be possible. After all, if one of my primary objections to AV was that the public didn’t want it, a referendum would test that.

That late-night phone call had been set up by our aides to confirm that a full coalition was off the table, and we were now only looking at confidence and supply. But Clegg and I both went off script. ‘Why are we doing this?’ we asked each other. We agreed that we should try again to go the whole hog. I said I would have another look at an AV referendum, and push my party towards a full coalition.

By Monday, though, I was utterly dejected. The soaring hopes of the morning before had been trampled, as the Lib Dems signalled their annoyance at the lack of movement on voting reform.

Worse was to come. When I met Clegg again in Parliament he said that Brown had now offered him a deal that was better than a referendum on AV. This confirmed what I had been hearing from colleagues and press contacts: Labour was throwing everything at staying in power, even talking to the Lib Dems about changing the country’s voting system to AV without asking the country.

I knew how hard it would be for Clegg to resist a full coalition and AV. But I also knew that Brown himself remained a huge barrier to a Lib–Lab deal. I appealed to Clegg as a democrat: ‘You can’t go with the guy who’s just been voted out.’ And I appealed to him as a rational human being: ‘You know you can’t work with him, but you know you can work with me.’

I gathered the shadow ministerial team in my Commons office for the second time that day. We hadn’t met in the nearby Shadow Cabinet Room since before the election, because I said we’d never go in there again. I am not a superstitious person, but we needed all the luck we could get, even if it did force party grandees to perch on chair arms and tables.

I outlined the Lib Dem proposals for a referendum and a deal. ‘We’ve got to offer something substantial on voting reform,’ I said. ‘And we’ve got to offer a full coalition.’

As we talked, Brown appeared on the television screen behind us. He said he would step down before the Labour conference in the autumn if that was what it would take for the Lib Dems to agree to a deal. It was a kamikaze mission. He was taking away one of the biggest obstacles to a Lib Dem deal with Labour.

Now it was clear what was at stake if we didn’t move.

Still, Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, and Theresa Villiers, shadow transport, said that we shouldn’t go ahead with the Lib Dems. But Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, Theresa May, the shadow work and pensions secretary – even David Mundell, who said he would lose his seat under AV – spoke in favour. Eric Pickles, the Conservative Party chairman, said in his laconic Yorkshire voice, ‘Go for it.’ He was echoed by the education spokesman and former journalist Michael Gove, an intellectual force in my inner team and a close friend. George Osborne agreed, adding that an AV referendum was essential if we were to persuade the Lib Dems to support us.

The chief whip, Patrick McLoughlin, a former miner and a veteran of the Margaret Thatcher and John Major governments, put it bluntly: ‘We have to live in the real world. Labour and the Lib Dems would be a legitimate government, and would command support in the country, especially with a new leader. We need to grasp this opportunity with both hands.’

I agreed. And I felt we had enough agreement round the room to proceed.

But I remained dejected. Brown’s gambit had changed everything. By sacrificing himself, I felt a Lib–Lab coalition was becoming inevitable. And while I was winning round my shadow cabinet over an AV promise, I wasn’t sure I could win over the party. ‘Put the pictures back up on the wall,’ I said as I walked out of my office, where everything had been packed up in bubble wrap, ready to be taken across the road to Downing Street. ‘It’s not going to happen.’

But even when things looked as hopeless as they did then, I knew I mustn’t stop trying. I went for one final push by paying a visit to our backbenchers’ forum, the 1922 Committee.

Along with the florist, the hair salon and the shooting gallery, the 22, as it is known, is one of many surprising features of Parliament: a trade-union-style meeting comprising, of all people, Tory MPs. Rather ominously for what we were about to embark on, it was named after the year Tory backbenchers decided to end the Lloyd George-led Liberal–Conservative alliance. It can often be a leader’s toughest audience.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Brown’s going. And they’re offering a full coalition. And they’ll go all the way on voting reform. The very least we can offer is a referendum on AV. It is the price of power. Are you willing to pay the price?’

I went home with the party’s backing for what I was contemplating, but I still felt that it wasn’t going to go our way.

‘Would you mind if I went on leading the party in opposition?’ I asked Sam. We had been talking about how a rainbow coalition would barely have a majority, and a shambolic government with a short shelf-life would need to be held to account.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You must carry on.’

On Tuesday I woke to a text from Ed, telling me to call him. He informed me of the latest – maybe even the final – twist: the talks between Labour and the Lib Dems had broken down. We were back in the game. The negotiators got back to work, this time armed with our final big concession. My mood shifted once again, this time to anticipation. This might actually come off.