‘The Gatekeeper’: The Cameron Era Through a Keyhole
A review of ‘The Gatekeeper’, by Kate Fall; HQ, 2020.
The British Conservatives are the most successful political party in history. But for some time they have been in a bit of a muddle. Arguably this began with the election of Margaret Thatcher, who was chiefly concerned with free enterprise. It is said that during a Conservative Party policy meeting, she removed a copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty from her handbag, slammed it down on the table and declared, ‘This is what we believe’. And yet, it marked a sharp break from traditional Toryism, which prized social stability, tradition, and a paternalistic duty to care for the vulnerable. Benjamin Disraeli, perhaps the greatest Conservative Prime Minister, coined the term ‘one-nation’ to describe his project of stitching together the different parts of British society by paying more attention to the welfare of the poor.
The party’s growing interest in free enterprise under Thatcher may have had much to do with the Cold War divide between socialism and state control on the one hand and individualism and free markets on the other. Certainly, it was a response to the strikes of the ‘Winter of Discontent’, bungled by Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan. But it continued in the years since, and came to be seen as the right economic policy in the eyes of the Labour Party as well. Thatcher, asked what her greatest achievement was, replied, ‘Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.’ Blair’s Labour project fused economic and social liberalism in a self-styled ‘third way’. He won a landslide.
David Cameron, Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, sold himself to the Tories and the public as the ‘heir to Blair’, promising, with his rise to the Tory leadership in 2005, to carry on what he saw as a best-of-both-worlds approach to politics: economic and social liberalism. At other times, he called himself a ‘compassionate conservative’, a ‘one-nation conservative’ and a ‘muscular liberal’. He sought to reduce the deficit, cut welfare, encourage private enterprise, champion same-sex marriage, promote the conservation of the natural world and increase foreign aid. Following the New Labour model, he believed that the private sector and community-led solutions would better deal with social problems than a big state. In 2010, he became Prime Minister.
David Cameron, Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, sold himself to the Tories and the public as the ‘heir to Blair’.
But he could not have got there without Kate Fall. In The Gatekeeper, she describes her time as Deputy Chief of Staff to then-PM. Literally and metaphorically, she controlled access to Cameron, deciding who could see him and how his time should be used. Consequently she had a front-row seat to the critical points in Cameron’s time in office: the Scottish Independence Referendum, austerity, and the Brexit referendum, rising Euroscepticism having loomed large over the second half of Cameron’s tenure. To a great extent Fall is more interested in the people and the personal cost of politics, rather than the events themselves. She cares, too, about the effects of the constant pressure and intense public scrutiny on politicians and their families.
Biographers and others have said that Boris Johnson was (perhaps is) basically friendless. Cameron, with whom he went to school and university, and who was a fellow member of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford, comes across as a social sort of guy who leans heavily on his family and friends. Fall paints him as someone who is self-confident but aware of his own limitations. He relies on people like Fall, like his wife, Samantha, like George Osborne, his chancellor. The coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats very much has the aspect of a marriage of convenience, cliché though that comparison now is, though Cameron and the others do, on Fall’s view, try to find points of agreement and establish some harmony. Cameron is open about his feelings. He confides in Fall and others that he fears being the prime minister who lost Scotland. He frets about the E.U. referendum. No doubt some will find the sentimentality and cosiness of all this appalling, but it is clear that friendship sustained much of the leadership of the Tory party through a turbulent period in history.
The book is funny. George Osborne sends a big policy announcement on tax not to Matt Hancock, his chief of staff, but to Mike Hancock, a Lib Dem MP. Luckily (bizarrely?) the latter Hancock believes in work-life balance and does not read his emails on the weekend. The Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, feels threatened by Cameron’s swimming in the lake at a G8 conference, and proceeds to pass round pictures of himself in a pair of Speedos to other leaders. Osborne advises Fall not to buy a book called The Dark Is Rising for Barack Obama’s children. And it is sad: Cameron loses his eldest son, Ivan. He loses his principal private secretary, 42-year-old Chris Martin. He loses friends. And of course, after calling the Brexit referendum, sincerely believing the people would vote ‘Remain’, he resigns, so losing a job he cared about. It is all very human.
Osborne advises Fall not to buy a book called The Dark Is Rising for Barack Obama’s children.
Theme of such a book is loyalty, which is perhaps more common in politics that one might think. Fall explores loyalty to Cameron, to the Conservative Party, to the ideal she believes they all share. Loyalty brings rewards but imposes costs; in the shifting landscape of politics, it is tough to maintain unwavering support for anyone. As I alluded to at the start of this little review, the split within the Tory Party was growing wider and wider throughout Cameron’s time in office. On the one side were the liberal types, who broadly stood for individual liberty, free enterprise, and an inclusive, cosmopolitan outlook, drawing support chiefly from voters in the country’s cities. On the other were traditionalists who stood more for social cohesion, cultural continuity, and British identity. More on the fringes but still influential were the hardcore libertarians who wanted to transform ‘Britain into Singapore-on-Thames’. What begins as friction in Fall’s book ends in fallings-out.
The Gatekeeper has a candid, personal tone. It reads like a memoir, only with a subject who is not the memoirist. There is a good deal of anecdotes, some interesting, others amusing, others neither. What is most striking is how ordinary it all seems. The comedian Ricky Gervais said the best piece of advice he ever received was, ‘Don’t worry—no one else knows what they’re doing either.’ Read The Gatekeeper, and you will often have thoughts like that often. If you are interested in power-games and political intrigue then this might not be the book for you.
But it is a good book. It gives us a glimpse at the machine of British politics at a particularly interesting time in our history. Fall has an eye for detail, good recall and a talent for telling stories. Her account evokes a woman who was there from the start, who played her cards well, whose loyalty was rewarded, who missed absolutely nothing and remembered absolutely everything. It is not surprising that Cameron called her his ‘wingman’ and found her presence and her guidance so valuable during his years in office. Needless to say there will be many people who dislike conservatives qua conservatives, or who dislike Cameron and Osborne for some personal reason, or who struggled or suffered greatly under austerity. But as a book about the workings of politics, about loyalty, about friendship, and about the specific challenges faced by women in roles of political power, it is a good read.
