Did the PM trick his party into the coalition?

The battle for No. 10 was on a knife edge. But many Tory MPs feel Dave wilfully misled them to get their backing

AT 10am on the Friday after the election in 2010, David Cameron’s team met in his room at the Westminster Bridge Park Plaza Hotel. Cameron was clear that, unable to form a majority government, they had to begin talks with the Lib Dems about forming a coalition. But in a rare example of strategic discord, George Osborne disagreed.

Though he had been involved in contingency planning for a hung parliament, the Shadow Chancellor now believed their primary focus should be on ejecting Gordon Brown from No. 10.

He was opposed to early approaches to the Lib Dems, arguing instead for forming a minority administration in order to get the Tories into government as quickly as possible.

According to one present, all of those in the hotel room except Cameron agreed with Osborne.

‘I remember it so clearly,’ says the source. ‘It was just really striking. It was 100 per cent personal leadership. People in that room argued against it, and he just said, “No, this is what I want to do. I’m sure this is right.”’

This, however, is not quite the full story.

Earlier that morning, Cameron had t elephoned David Davis seeking advice. ‘He hadn’t won the election and I think he feared a coup d’état,’ an insider reflects. ‘David [Davis] told him: “You’ve got no choice but to go for full coalition, but you mustn’t give them PR (Proportional Representation, a key plank of the Lib Dem manifesto).

‘“The party will not forgive you for trading one period in government for us being in Opposition for the rest of our lives.”’

Later, Cameron would claim that his decision to aim for a coalition with the Lib Dems was the result of a ‘fairly epiphanous moment’ when he woke from a snatched two-hour nap on Friday morning.

For all the credit he deserves for fleet-footedness and laser focus that day, this is somewhat disingenuous. In truth, plans for approaching the Lib Dems with an offer of ‘full coalition’ had been in the mix for months.

Behind closed doors, he had assembled a special unit — Osborne, William Hague, Oliver Letwin and Chief of Staff Edward Llewellyn — tasked with preparing the ground for negotiations.

The team met twice for Sunday night dinner at Osborne’s house. There, Letwin presented the others with a line-by-line study of the Lib Dem manifesto, highlighting areas of potential agreement and those of possible discord.

This formed the basis for what would later become the coalition agreement. Cameron signed it off shortly before election day.

Formal talks between the two parties began in earnest on the evening that the election results came in, showing the Tories had fallen short of an overall majority.

To Cameron’s frustration, the Lib Dem l eader hard- balled, making it clear he would accept nothing less than a referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV).

To add to Cameron’s woes, he had a sneaking suspicion — correct, as it turned out — that Clegg was talking to Brown behind his back, playing the two parties off against each other to secure the best deal on voting reform.

At 4pm on the fifth day of talks, a panicked Cameron called Clegg. After an explosion of recriminations about double-dealing, he hung up, convinced the Lib Dem leader was on the cusp of a deal with Brown.

At the heart of this conviction lay the belief that an increasingly desperate Brown had resorted to offering Clegg AV without a referendum, a gesture Cameron believed spelled the end of Lib–Con negotiations. He knew he could not match it.

At 4.45pm, Cameron met the rest of his Shadow Cabinet. Their discussions were briefly interrupted by the dramatic spectacle of Brown appearing on Downing Street to announce his resignation.

Cameron set out the state of play: Labour was offering Clegg AV without a referendum, and unless the Conservatives hit back hard and fast with their own offer of a refer- endum, the game was up. Galvanised, colleagues quickly agreed.

Cameron then took the plan to his backbenchers, reiterating his warning that Labour was offering legislation on AV without a referendum.

Though the process was rushed and informal, he secured their acquiescence, and was reportedly cheered loudly when he explained that they would have to compromise on AV if they did not want to spend the next five years on the Opposition benches.

Having moved swiftly and decisively to head off a rearguard action from Brown and his team, the Tories were able to announce on Monday evening that they would now ‘go the extra mile’.

With Lib–Lab discussions disintegrating over other issues, Cameron’s work was effectively done.

The pendulum had by now swung decisively in his favour. The following day he would be on his way to Buckingham Palace, to be asked to form a government.

‘Cameron completely outmanoeuvred Gordon Brown during that period,’ the f ormer Tory minister Tim Yeo later reflected. ‘And he drove it through the parliamentary party, which was also a big achievement.’

For Michael Gove, the coalition deal was proof that Cameron is ‘just a natural-born politician. He can read the currents and eddies in politics supremely well’.

Yet Cameron’s conduct during the negotiation period is not without its critics. Many on the Conservative benches felt cheated when it later emerged that, contrary to the Tory leader’s claims to them, Labour had not in fact made any offer of AV without a referendum.

Even if, as Cameron maintains, Brown was making wild offers that effectively amounted to the same thing, the fact remains that no formal offer could have been made, for the simple reason that formal Lib– Lab negotiations had not started by the time Cameron notified his party of the proposition.

Any discussions between the two parties were unofficial and taking place through back channels. Additionally, i t remains highly unlikely that Brown — or whoever followed him — could have pushed such an agreement through the Labour Party.

For some, this amounts to saying that the coalition was built on a lie.

The certainty with which Cameron i nf or med MPs a nd Shadow ministers of the specifics of a Labour offer that never actually existed suggests a degree of flexibility with the truth. Cameron and Osborne both emphatically deny t hat t hey knowingly deceived their MPs, suggesting instead that the ‘fog of war’ contributed to a firm belief in Tory circles that Brown was chucking everything onto the table in order to make a Lib–Lab deal stick.

Indeed, after the event Cameron continued to insist he still believed Brown would have gone for it: ‘I was absolutely certain in my own mind that that was the case. I think I had good reason to be certain.’

Unless conclusive evidence incriminating Cameron and his lieutenant emerges, the most that can be said today is that Cameron — willingly or unwillingly — did not get to the bottom of what Labour was offering before he seized the keys of Downing Street.

Nick Clegg was talking to Labour behind his back