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Welcome back to Inside the Room with Ed Balls and George Osborne. Yeah, in Inside the Room, we get some of the biggest figures in British politics in recent years to take us behind the scenes to the moments that have really mattered.
in our political history. So we're sitting down with none other than David Cameron, former Prime Minister. We're talking about his first six months in the top job in the second half of 2010. It's brilliant to have you with us. Thank you for coming. Great to be with you. So we are now going to talk about that very important part of the job of Prime Minister, which is being First Lord of the Treasury, because you've settled into Downing Street. I've settled into the Treasury.
And we are in June, and we're about to do the first coalition budget for decades, because, of course, there hasn't been a coalition. And the first... budget by a Conservative Chancellor in 14 years. Let's remind everyone by setting the scene. The new government had promised an emergency budget within 50 days of coming to power. It would be, he said, tough but fair. Because the legacy we've been left is so bad, the measures that we need to deal with it...
will be unavoidably tough. Just a month into the job, Britain's finance minister George Osborne held aloft the toughest measures in a generation. In the space of just one week, we have found and agreed to cut six and a quarter billion pounds of wasteful spending across the public sector. Schools across our region have been redrawing their future today after the government pulled the plug on... new building plans.
I'd agreed with the Treasury that these 700 schools would go ahead. It is the Conservatives and the Liberals who have now decided it is not their priority. The new Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, has been preparing the ground for the Defence and Security Review this autumn. His comments came after news emerged yesterday of two high-profile departures from the MOD, timed to coincide with it. Dr. Fox said the government would act ruthlessly and without sentiment in finding savings.
The main rate of VAT will rise from 17.5% to 20%. Yes, it's his first budget, but it's the same old Tories. least afford it and breaking their promises. The rich is paying the most and the vulnerable protect it. That is our approach. Thank you very much indeed to Bloomberg for giving me the opportunity this morning. to respond from the same platform to the rather bullish speech.
We had from George Osborne just 10 days ago. And the Chancellor again declared that this was the only possible credible economic strategy for the future. I'm very worried that he's taking a risk with both the growth in the economy and jobs. I'm absolutely convinced...
government is absolutely convinced that we will not be able to play our part in the affairs of the world unless we also have a strong sustainable economy at home. This budget is needed to deal with our country's debts. This budget is... needed to give confidence to our economy. This is the unavoidable budget. I'd like to start by the year before the election.
and then going into the election campaign. George, on our podcast a couple of times in the last year, has said that maybe his decision to go so hard on the need for immediate public spending cuts, to go for austerity, might have lost you. The majority. And you say in your autobiography that it was all a bit black skies in the election campaign. Did you have a conversation at any point with George where you said, are you going too far?
No, because I was completely convinced that the strategy we're pursuing, which was jointly agreed between us, was the right one. And I think the important point is we did set it out in opposition. You know, George announced a public sector pay freeze for two years. Before we became the government, we announced those six billion of immediate spending cuts in opposition. We said to people that this is going to be difficult before the election. And I think that's really important.
I didn't deny you the majority. I think that the fact that we said in advance... that we were going to make difficult decisions. I mean, I think it may have affected how we did at the election. It's impossible to tell. But I would do exactly the same thing all over again because I'd rather be a prime minister who had the permission.
to take the action I thought was necessary than to suddenly stand up after the election and say, oh, I've opened the books and it's all terrible and I'm going to have to make these decisions, which I think lacks any credibility. And I think, ironically, it may have...
It meant that we didn't win as many seats as we could have done in 2010 because people were worried about the action we were going to take. But on the other hand, it helped us get re-elected in 2015 because we were able to take people with us on what was a difficult journey. And I think that...
I wouldn't have done it any other way. I actually remember a press conference, I think, before the election when I said I'd rather be a one-term prime minister trying to do the right thing than a two-term prime minister endlessly doing the wrong one. And I think you said to me afterwards,
Put that a bit too frankly, I think. So it was, you know, we took very difficult decisions after 2010, but they were ones that by and large we had prepared people for. I think also, you know, in preparation for this, I was reminding myself of... that time even this feels almost like a different person when i see myself you know doing that budget the way is very striking before we get on to the actual measures and the kind of
The fiscal judgment, the economic plan was at the core of what we were offering. It was sort of central to the general election campaign. It infused. all of our sort of domestic messaging, even though we did have come on and talk about some of the other domestic reforms that were going on at the time. In foreign policy, when we were turning up a G20s or G8s, as it was then, or the IMF, we were trying to get them.
international backing for what we were doing but the the plan plan a as it came to be known you know suffused everything suffused everything and we it wasn't just like and here's another thing we're doing let's talk about the economy
And no one doubted, whether you liked it or not, that these people had an idea of what they wanted to do, and they were getting on and delivering it. And no one felt, you know, we haven't been told about this in advance, or they're all over the shop, they don't know what they're doing.
As I say, lots of people, including you've heard there from Ed, thought it was the wrong thing to do. But no one doubted we were in charge and had a plan. But it was also the foundation of the coalition and the Liberal Democrats had opposed. your plan in the election campaign. And then Vince Cable's pushed aside, really, as an economic spokesman. And for Nick Clegg and David Laws in particular, it becomes...
the underpinning purpose of a coalition in the national interest. And so it becomes what the coalition is for. No, and I think they did become convinced. And George did a great job here. They did become convinced it was the right plan. Vince, I think, was always in a slightly different place. But, you know, at the heart, when we launched that spending round and we launched the budget.
It was a pretty united coalition that did that. I mean, I am at heart a fiscal conservative. I mean, I've always believed that you have to have a care for these things. I'm very worried about the state of the world today with the amount of deficits and debts when you look around, you know. Britain and France and America. And so I was absolutely behind what we were doing. It obviously has a consequence because...
You know, you've got this hugely important economic plan. You can try and do one or two other things at the same time. And, you know, I'd highlight, say, the education reforms and welfare reforms and some of the big society things we did. But it becomes very difficult.
choose when you get to be prime minister. We came in at a time when the budget deficit was 10% of GDP, and that had to be the biggest thing. That was the job. And that does have consequences. But do you think also a kind of good prime minister...
in the end has to make choices about what they're trying to achieve. And you can't just have your economic plan alongside the other things you want to do. The economic plan underpins everything domestically, doesn't it? Because otherwise you don't really have the credibility to say,
We're going to be improving schools and people go, yeah, well, fine, but your economy is screwed. So how are you going to be doing that? I completely agree with that. I also think it matters massively for foreign policy. I mean, I sometimes joke, I feel like I was...
Prime Minister twice, once when the economy was growing, when the rest of the world is like, great, what are you doing? We want your investment. We want to come and see. The other time when the economy is not doing so well and it's like, you know, you really, it's a tough, tough time because...
The economic figures have a huge impact on all the other things you're doing, including Britain's place in the world. So let me ask you a provocative... question about your relationship um you and george um the number 10 treasury relationship because you both went out of your way to say we're not going to be like um thatcher lawson
Brown darling particularly Brown and Blair we're going to be this team this partnership we're going to work really closely together but um from the outside it kind of looked like You let George get on with it, that actually George was running the Treasury. He was setting up the budget. And actually, in your relationship to George on the economy and the budget.
Actually, it was very like Blair and Brown. Tony Blair didn't really want to run the economy. He let Gordon get on with it. No, I think it was different in lots of ways. One was it was an absolute... partnership right from the start uh right from in parliament in 2001 when we both got in and decided that we needed to help sort out the conservative party or vape blair and brown yes but
But there was never some rivalry that grew up. There wasn't a George team and a Dave team. We had a bunch of people who, like Rupert Harrison, who effectively worked for both of us. And even in opposition, we had... our offices were in the same place and our staff were all together in one room. But maybe there wasn't enough rivalry. Maybe George should have said, David, don't do the referendum.
Well, you should have said, George, don't do the omni-shambles budget. Maybe the rivalry was the thing you were missing. The other thing that we did was, you know, in the run-up to budgets, and not least because I had...
worked in the Treasury in the round of budgets is, you know, the scorecard, that vital thing that I suspect Tony Blair only saw the day before the budget. I was seeing... He didn't see it the day before the budget. He never saw it. Oh, no. We had, you know, James Bowler would come...
From the Treasury with the scorecard, and George and I would sit down going over every single line of it, every fundraising measure. James Barlow, who used to run my office, he'd never sent it to number 10. Right. Well, that changed.
And no, I think I've thought a lot about this because I think you can't have an effective government just as you can't have an effective company without a chief executive and a finance director who get on. You can't have an effective country unless the Prime Minister Chancellor are absolutely locked together.
George and I were lucky in that we were friends and colleagues and partners. And as I say, it was a partnership. I do think maybe we've got to find a better way of getting Number 10 and the Treasury to work together in a more sort of institutional sense. Because as I said earlier...
they do build up these, they almost erect barriers. Even when you're getting on well, they try and erect barriers. But we, didn't we... It depends so much on the personality, the majority, the situation. It gets a bit techie, but I think in the foreign policy sphere, the National Security Council...
basically meant that the prime minister put himself in charge of foreign policy, where you had the foreign secretary, the development secretary, the chancellor, all sitting around the table deciding, right,
what approach are we going to take to India? What approach are we going to take in terms of Afghanistan? And you sort of, you put the prime minister at the head of the machine. And I think there might be a way of doing that with economic policy. The only frustration... I would say that on the budget, we were absolutely, and the big spending events, you know, absolutely lined up elsewhere in the forest when you're trying to get houses built or you're trying to change this in education, whatever.
Not George, of course not, but the Treasury institutionally is often in all those meetings and frustrating the will of the Prime Minister. You've got to find a way of making the government be driven. by prime minister and chancellor through some, you know, as it were, economic equivalent of the National Security Council. Do you think a prime minister is sort of well-equipped to interrogate a chancellor? I mean, you relied a lot on our...
friendship and partnership and you know i would say at the core of it compared to others who've done the job you know i essentially put aside my own personal ambitions to be the prime minister to support you knowing i would never challenge you for the job and you in turn gave me...
much more responsibility than a prime minister would normally give chance. And so we had each other's backs. You can't count on that always being the case. So that's what I thought about. Is there something you could do to try and make this work better? But you did have, you know, for example, you know, now sadly passed. Jeremy Haywood, they're kind of saying to you, I remember at the time, come on, David, you know, we should develop more of a capacity here at number 10.
challenge these treasury numbers we can't just take it and he of course has been a treasury official and knew all the games the treasury plays which for people who don't understand this you know literally the prime minister doesn't know the real numbers you know they are it's often just
Can I just say, Jeremy always knew all the real numbers. He totally cooperated in this so-called game because actually it strengthened Jeremy's power in number 10 that he was the guy who knew what was going on rather than anybody else. Tony Blair knew everything he wanted to do. know, but Jeremy knew everything. I think it's a fair point. I was very sort of affected by, I suppose, the Thatcher-Lawson period, where...
If you end up with specialist advisors on the economy in Number 10 Downing Street, you then get a new institutional battle between Number 10 and the Treasury, where the Treasury then will withdraw further and you'll get even fewer numbers. So I thought with... Jeremy Hayward and people like Chris Martin, who had great treasure experience. I was getting enough. You're listening to Inside Number 10. David Cameron, the first six months. We'll be back after this.
Welcome back. Let me take you back to your biography and those discussions. One thing which shines through really strongly in your discussion of that budget in 2010 is you were absolutely determined there was going to be no watering down. of benefits for pensions, the winter allowance.
free bus travel, protecting the uprating of pensioners. You talk about introducing the triple lock. When I read that, I slightly think to myself that something was going on, that there were some discussions between you and George, that maybe the Treasury had said, Prime Minister, you know...
As part of these difficult cuts, we're going to have to pare some things back. And you said to you, sorry, George, no, the winter allowance is not going to be cut. As you know, as you both know, the Treasury never really liked a lot of these. pensioner benefits and was always trying to chip away at them. I can't remember whether specifically they said, let's get rid of the window fuel allowance, but I'd said...
George will remember. Did you ever say that to him? It was definitely on the list. George is nodding here. At the TV debate, I'd looked down the barrel of the camera and I said... All these benefits are going to stay. And I meant what I said. And I think in my book is what I rather grandly call David Cameron's rule of promises. There's a difference between saying, look, I want to cut unemployment. I promise I'm going to do it. That's a promise you're trying to.
achieve something. But if you break a promise that only you can break. There's only one person who can get rid of the winter fuel allowance, and that's the prime minister. So there's only one person who can break your own promise. And I do think those sorts of broken promises, people rightly are very unforgiving. So you didn't need your own economic advice.
advisor in number 10, you had a close partnership with George on the 2010 budget, but there were moments when you would have had to say, no, that's not what we're going to do. Yes, of course. And that's a... those pensioner benefits is a good example.
Oh, and also 0.7% on overseas aid. I mean, everyone wanted to scrap that, including Nick Clegg. I was very stubborn about it. Again, we had made a promise. It was a very big part of our manifesto. And I think, again, it just comes back to this thing. If the only person who can break the promise is you, you really need to think very, very hard. And what do we think now? I mean, it's such a hard question for me to ask you. It's slightly ridiculous. But, you know, obviously the government...
that you led is known for austerity. The decisions we made in that first budget in June 2010 and then in the spending review in October that year. define so much of the reputation of their government. I think you and I would both say absolutely necessary, stabilize the economy, put Britain back on the front foot and so on and created jobs in the private sector.
Do you feel at the time we knew we were writing the history of the government there and then that it's hard to get a hearing for some of the other things the government did domestically? I think that we felt in many ways we didn't really have a choice that this was, as you...
You put it in that clip, the unavoidable budget. There is no alternative. I didn't really believe there was a, there were alternatives, but I think they would have ended in a worse outcome. But it is interesting that, you know, here we all are in 2024. and you're still having to sort of make the argument. Someone I would say, you know, look at the numbers.
grew over 2% a year, highest growth in the G7 at the end of the parliament, created 1,000 jobs for every day we were in office, business investment. I'm a great believer in... crowding out and crowding in. And the decisions we took, I think, helped to boost business investment through that period. I think it worked. But we're still having to make that argument because there's a huge establishment out there that thinks, no, no.
Austerity was a mistake. I think you and George have been making that argument. I mean, it's not just to Labour figures. I mean, there have been rather a lot of your successors who then wanted to say, actually, they got it wrong, Cameron Osborne, to say no return to austerity. One of the most frustrating things in recent years is how new prime ministers seem to think
think you have to sort of ditch the record of the previous Prime Minister. I mean, I say that, and if you, on the steps of Downing Street, going back to our last episode, you know, I stood outside the steps of Downing Street when I became Prime Minister and praised the previous government for some of the things that it had done.
and kept a lot of things. And I think it's a real, you know, it's one of the reasons we're struggling, I think, to, you know, get infrastructure built, get things done, is too many decisions are undone by successive governments. So moving on, you were saying that on the economic agenda, you and George were very tight, but there's also a broader policy agenda that you're enacting, some of which is controversial, some doesn't go to plan. And that's what we'll turn to next.
Welcome back. We're looking at the first six months and in this period we don't actually know whether austerity is going to work or not. That's a judgment which comes later but you're also trying to get a huge reform agenda through. Let's remind ourselves of a few of those big policies.
We are the radicals now, breaking apart the old system with a massive transfer of power from the state to citizens, politicians to people, government to society. That is the power shift our country needs today and we can deliver it in government. We're changing the way in which the lead table system works. I want to create a new qualification and above all I want to ensure that the exams themselves
become tougher and more rigorous over time. The benefit system has created pockets of worklessness where idleness has almost become institutionalized. This paper sets out the options available for a new regime to replace the current complex system.
A plan to sell off English forests as a cost-cutting measure has caused such a public outcry the UK's coalition government has been forced to backtrack. The most radical reform of the National Health Service in England for more than 60 years is to go ahead. imposing ambitious reforms to make sure services which fail patients have nowhere to hide.
That was a little medley of the various public service reforms that all got underway in the autumn of 2010. There was Michael Gove talking about the education reforms, Ian Duncan Smith talking about the introduction of universal credit. That was a big reform to welfare. And then at the end there, Andrew Lansley talking about the reforms to the NHS that were unveiled that autumn. I'm going to start with the origins of all of this. So some of these plans, like education...
had been long in gestation in opposition. Some had been long in gestation, but just not in our opposition. So Ian's welfare reforms had been developed by his own think tank. And some had sort of come out of the blue, like Andrew Lansley's health reforms. So when you look at the sort of domestic reform agenda, how much of it was pre-planned in your view?
I think a lot of it was because we had this five years in opposition and a big policy review process. But looking back, I'd definitely say that the things that were more planned in opposition... So if you take, for instance, the education reforms, the concept of free schools, of new schools in the state sector, but not belonging to the state, offering a free education.
to children alongside traditional comprehensives. But a massive success, you know, 500 of them set up, some of them getting more kids into Oxford and Cambridge than leading private schools. I think the ones, those reforms that have been really thought through in opposition... Not just what we wanted to do, but how we're going to do it. They definitely were the most successful. And things that had to be kind of refashioned and rebuilt.
in government, with all this other busy stuff going on, I think we're less successful. There's a kind of Henry Kissinger point, he says, that in government, you spend the intellectual capital that you... accumulate outside government. In other words, it's incredibly hard for governments to think on their feet. It's incredibly hard for governments to come up with new policies and new plans that are, you know...
That's just the nature of government. You're doing things. You're not thinking things. I think that's right. I think, you know, if you think of the big society reforms too, I mean, you know, National Citizen Service was something we set up. We actually set it up in opposition. We went out. raised philanthropic capital, charitable donations, and trialed a scheme of...
you know, young people from different backgrounds going and doing, you know, orienteering and adventure stuff and then going back into their communities and developing a social impact project. We actually trialled in opposition, so we'd actually done it.
So I think you have time in opposition. You have the opportunity to reach out and listen to different people. Whereas in government, the civil service tries to take over the policymaking process. And sometimes that can work well, but often you get bogged down. I've heard you both talk about the lessons you drew from Tony Blair. And Tony Blair says in his book, after all those years as prime minister, he wished he'd gone faster.
You know, that you've got to be decisive and quick and he regrets he didn't move more quickly to reform. But the reality of... the Blair Brown period after 97, is in some areas they did move quickly, education reform on the budget. Other areas, they decided to go much more cautiously because they didn't know...
from opposition, how it really worked in government. And the NHS is a good example of that. We were very cautious, 97, 98, 99, about NHS reform, because we didn't know how the system worked. And I wonder whether you didn't... kind of draw the wrong conclusion from Tony Blair. And some of the areas where you got into trouble was because you tried, and I'm not saying educational big society, but the forests.
or the health reforms, you try to go quickly because Tony Blair had said, go fast. And in fact, it kind of went wrong. That might be true in some ways. On forests, it was literally, when you're... trying to save money and trying to engineer the state to be more affordable. You have to take dozens of decisions and some of them don't work. And with Forrest, it was just, you know, we didn't have political...
or public permission to do it. There were lots of arguments for it, but we just lost the argument. It was only going to raise a small amount of money and much better to cut your losses. I mean, George was always very good at saying this to me, you know, look at the numbers on the budget sheet, the things that raise serious money. You're going to ask yourself. What are the political downsides of those things? And if it's a small amount of money you're raising, but a big political cost, you know.
stop bashing your head against the wall. But the health reforms... You know, I think we could draw a lesson on the inheritance tax on farmers on this one. In your book, you say... I trusted Andrew Lansley too much and I was blinded by his science. And the reality was that was also a place where you ended up with a big U-turn, a big centralisation, because actually it turned out that he didn't really know what his reforms were.
were all about. And you guys certainly didn't. Was that a mistake? I think we made mistakes with respect to the health reforms. The idea originally was to try and give... GPs and hospitals, more power and independence inside the sort of internal market of the NHS. But in coalition and in government, it turned into...
an enormous bureaucratic exercise of abolishing primary care trusts. And then once we got into that, then you had to reassure people by having other bodies and it became a sort of a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare. And as I said in the book, I think it would have been... better to try and just focus on one or two areas, how we cope with an aging population, how we reform social care. And as you say,
take the rest of it more slowly. So in some places, haste is necessary. With education, we wouldn't have got new schools set up unless we'd gone at it pretty hard. But in healthcare, I think a different lesson needed to be learned. And what's the role of the... Prime Minister in driving these reforms, because you had strong secretaries of state, Michael Govey and Duncan Smith, doing their thing.
But with Andrew Lanzi, who we both like, but it was such an important issue for us, the NHS, it didn't go well in the coalition. strained over it. If you look at the Prime Minister's subsequent to you, some have kind of obsessively got into the detail. There's a big attempt by the current government to create...
cross-departmental mission boards. Tony Blair talks about this in his new book. I think the truth is that if you want reforms to take place, the Prime Minister has got to be very directly... involved at helping to drive them. Now, when it came to education, Michael Gove was hugely capable, but it still required prime ministerial backing, you know, against some of the sort of
And the Treasury. And the Treasury backing. Every budget we had to fund. Was important. When you got things like planning reform, which we made some big steps forward on. You know, haven't had quite the effect we wanted. I found there you absolutely had to have the prime minister chairing, you know, meetings with the relevant departments, driving the progress, trying to remember the problem we had, trying to get the NHS and other departments.
to release land for houses to be built on. That required, you know, the Prime Minister getting them around the table, banging your fist on the table. And you talked about specific sites. I remember there was some sort of naval dockyard in Rochester that...
Suddenly there was the discovery that nightingales, you know, nested there and the whole thing had to be put on hold. But, you know, it's a bad reflection of our system, but it does require the Prime Minister to get very involved and to drive the change. And you had stripped down number 10 a bit. You'd sort of drunk the opposition. Kool-Aid
That number 10 was too big, that Tony Blair made it too presidential. We got rid of the delivery unit in number 10 and then essentially have to recreate it. I think that was a mistake. I think we did believe our own propaganda about inflated number 10. Actually, number 10 is next to other departments, very small. And you need a delivery unit because you've got to be able to, you've got to be.
permanently checking up on whether the things you think are being done are actually being done. I mean, I did have experience as prime minister sometimes of, you know, chairing a meeting, saying, right, we've decided to do X. And, you know, six months later, you'd say, how is X coming along? And you find out that actually literally nothing had happened.
Talk to Michael Gove. Look, we're part of the free schools debate because I don't agree with you, but put that to one side. I mean, Michael says that getting rid of sure start... And weakening the children's focus was a mistake. He regrets that. You abolished the delivery unit. You stopped contact point. You got rid of the regional development agencies all very quickly. Earlier, you said that you need continuity.
and that you need kind of governments to carry on doing the things which are good. Is there a pressure on a new prime minister just to scrap things because... They were from the past? Well, we did have an alternative plan to the regional development agencies, which we put in place. Now, you can argue whether it was better or worse, but it was a plan. It took quite a long time to get to the plan. Yes, but that's because reforms take a long time for all the reasons we're familiar with.
But I think it's a mixture. There are definitely lots of things I did keep. I mean, not least, you know, independence of the Bank of England. And we enhanced that with what we did with the OBR and the Treasury. So I think it's a mixture. But where you're trying to change.
things where there's a certain amount of sort of institutional inertia and planning and housing and education would be key examples. And we have to talk to you about key personnel in Downing Street in this period, especially on this broader policy reform agenda. Brought in from opposition, Steve Hilton. You said he was passionate, bold, volatile.
Magnetic. And he went off to Stanford at one point to do a sabbatical before he finally left and expressed his massive frustration. He never knew what was going on. It was the civil servant's fault, you know, all these submissions coming to him. In retrospect, are the people who are creative in opposition?
always the right people to take into government with you? And how do you learn who are the guys who will actually really deliver for you and the ones who are going to make a lot of noise and cause a lot of disruption and in the end get in the way? Obviously, we spectacularly fell out later on, but he was, you know, he was...
very brilliant in terms of being able to combine deep policy knowledge with the ability to combine it with a story about what it was about. Because, I mean, that's so often the problem. But a delivery unit assessment of him would not have been very positive. No, although on the other hand, you could say, look, some of the things that we did...
For instance, something like National Citizen Service, sadly now scrapped by the new government. But, you know, a million young people went through that and had an over 90% approval rating. It changed a lot of people's lives without a Steve who was really in opposition. hammering away at it, raising money for it, getting it up and running, you know, even in opposition when you haven't got any money or any resources. So he was good at that. I think that there came a point in number 10 when he...
probably wanted to sort of pursue his own political career rather than help me with mine. He's trying to become the mayor of... The governor of California. Abstracting from individual personalities, because we talked about continuity with Jeremy Hayward. and James Bowler earlier, for a new prime minister in those first six months, looking across the broad agenda, which are the jobs where it's vital to bring in...
The right people. Is it more important to have the brilliant comms guy or the creative policy person or the foreign policy person who can challenge the official advice? In your first six months, where the... the areas where you thought thank god i've got the right person and where you thought
I think it's a mixture of right people, but it's also having a very clear plan. And that plan's got to involve, you know, do I want to keep Jeremy Hayward? Do I want to keep the private secretaries that are there? Who are the people I'm going to bring in? And also...
I know this almost sounds too micro, but, you know, where's everyone going to sit? How's it going to work? How are we going to – because actually that's important in number 10. On the whole, number 10 is too weak. Number 10 needs to be strengthened. I think Tony Blair is right about that. I think if I had my time again, I'd...
almost combine Number 10 and the Cabinet Office into one sort of proper prime ministerial department. As I said, you know, with the National Security Council, with a sort of economic council that brings everyone together. But in terms of the people, I think your chief of staff... is absolutely crucial. Who you're going to bring in to dock with the civil service and make the political and the civil service join up. I think that's important. What's the job spec for the chief of staff? It's very...
It's very hard to answer briefly. It's to bring together. You know, the political strategy that you bring from opposition and the plan you've been working on to bring that together with the machine of government and make sure that you're one team trying to deliver it. And Ed was particularly good at doing that.
And then I think some – I was lucky that he was also a very good foreign affairs advisor. But I think you do need – you definitely need that. It's interesting that neither of you in this conversation have yet talked about comms. You've talked about Ed Llewellyn. You've talked about –
servants. I race Steve Hilton. But actually, Andy Coulson, the communications effort is not something that you have brought up and yet you would think it's vital. He was and is brilliant. I personally think it's quite hard to In those sort of close personal political jobs around a prime minister or indeed a leader of the opposition, it's quite hard to write out the job spec.
You find individuals who are very talented and bring something to you and are loyal and creative. And the jobs sort of form around them. So Andy Coulson was a different comms director to... other comms directors who might have been more sort of, you know, just on the daily, you know, briefing of the newspapers. He was a kind of key advisor. You know, Ed Llewellyn was...
Did, you know, had that kind of foreign affairs and civil service connection, which some chiefs would have. You know, I think sometimes you find the people and create the jobs around them. The comms person is obviously crucial. And Andy and Craig Oliver did a brilliant job. But there's something that comes before that, which is the person who helps you think through.
What's it all about? So Steve Hilton was more important than Andy Coulson. Right back in. Well, Steve Hilton was working for me in 2005. He was on my leadership campaign team. And the bit that is. about, right, okay, we've got our views on how we should reform education and what we should do with welfare and the economic strategy. But there's a lot of time that needs to be spent. This will sound very much like navel-gazing, but I promise it isn't.
How does this all hang together? What's it about? What are we trying to do? What's the story we're telling about what this government, what this reform of the Conservative Party is about, what this government's going to be about, what we're trying to change? Because if you...
You have to spend a lot of time on that. I know it sounds like, well, that's obvious, you know. I think that is. And if you get that right, then the communications will follow. If you're not a good storyteller, can you be a good prime minister? No. I think you have to be both a good storyteller and also...
It sounds condescending to say it, I don't mean like that, but you have to be a good teacher in that you have to be communicating all the time yourself. I mean, lots of the things I got wrong. For instance, something like House of Lords reform, you know, I just did not explain to my party or the public what I was trying to do.
And I think you have to explain, explain, explain all the time. You say in your book, though, that you wanted to be a good teacher, but to begin with, you were too busy learning. That's probably true. So on that note, we're going to stop. And we have got one more episode coming up of Inside the Room. So we are going to turn to that shortly. And what we're going to move on to is the international stage, because I think you worked out, David, that you spent...
a full third of your entire time as Prime Minister dealing with international events and foreign affairs and defence issues. And that will be how we start. No, that's right. I re-read that. I thought it was a quarter. And only this morning I re-read that chapter of the book. And it says a third. And we did work it out. It must be a third. I thought it was... So it's... I keep forgetting how much it was. That's why...
One of these three episodes is going to be about it. White House, China, Afghanistan. Very good. We're going to move on to that next. Great. So we'll be back with episode three of Inside Number 10. David Cameron, the first six months on Monday. It's a cracking episode. You have to wait.
until monday if you're just a regular listener to the show but if you are a political currency gold subscriber you are in the front row and you can listen to it right now ad free join up sign up and if you already signed up listen you can find details of how to join our political party in the show notes we will see you next time You've been listening to Inside Number 10, David Cameron, the first six months. This is a Persefonica production.