were defensive and painful to watch.
The senior staff muttered and moaned about biased broadcast coverage. It is probably true that with the country expecting a Tory landslide, our plans were subjected to more scrutiny than Labour’s. But we were not generating the stories to earn good broadcast coverage. Television and radio need a proposition to argue about: a policy that can be promoted by one side and criticized by another. But all we were offering was the same old shots of Theresa saying the same things at the same old rallies of activists. They say you campaign in poetry and govern in prose, but we were campaigning in sullen, monosyllabic grunts.
And we became the victims of what Harold Macmillan called, ‘events, dear boy’. On 12 May, the NHS was struck by a massive cyber-attack, which dominated the news for days. And then, on 22 May, tragedy struck. Salman Ramadan Abedi, a suicide bomber originally from Libya, blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena. Twenty-two innocent victims were killed and hundreds, most of whom were children, were injured. On 3 June another attack came. Three Islamist terrorists rammed a van into pedestrians on London Bridge before stabbing people at random in bars and pubs in Borough Market. They killed eight people and injured forty-eight others. These were the second and third attacks on Britain in only three months, as they followed an earlier Islamist atrocity on Westminster Bridge, which had occurred in March.
Our response was flat-footed. Having spent years in the Home Office and Downing Street, we were used to responding to terrible crimes and terror plots. But yet again there was a split between the Downing Street team and the campaign consultants. The Australians wanted Theresa to take to Twitter and denounce what they called Islamic terror. We resisted kneejerk reactions on social media and took ourselves off to Cobra, the government emergency committee. By the time Theresa made her statements to the nation from behind the Downing Street lectern, with both Manchester and London Bridge, Labour’s narratives were taking hold. Despite Jeremy Corbyn’s long track record of appeasement and even support for terrorists, including Islamist terror groups, his claim that police cuts were to blame caught on. By the time Theresa adopted a tougher line after the second attack, we hadn’t just lost control of the narrative, she appeared to have lost control of events. Things looked very far from strong and stable.
Then came the manifesto. I had spent most of the campaign to date working on the policies we would put to the country, along with Ben Gummer and the Downing Street policy team. The product, presented to the country on 18 May, was in many respects the next iteration of the vision Theresa had set out in her original Downing Street speech.
‘Conservatism is not and never has been the philosophy described by caricaturists’, the manifesto declared. ‘We do not believe in untrammelled free markets. We reject the cult of selfish individualism. We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality. We see rigid dogma and ideology not just as needless but dangerous.’ In government, the Conservatives would ‘reject the ideological templates provided by the socialist left and the libertarian right and instead embrace the … good that government can do’.17
We sought to reconcile the conflicting judgements among the senior campaign team. Lynton hated making policy announcements, and accepted manifestos only as a grim necessity. And he maintained that the country wanted continuity, not change. But Theresa wanted an ambitious document that would give her a mandate to undertake reforms she believed were necessary. We struck on a way to emphasize both continuity and change, by making the manifesto about meeting the great long-term challenges facing the country. Mark Textor confirmed this was consistent with his understanding of voters’ concerns, and so we settled on the economy, Britain’s place in the world, social fairness, intergenerational fairness and the effects of new technologies.
In some respects, the policies lived up to the shift in values Theresa had promised in her early speeches and in the manifesto’s opening chapter. We promised a raft of new workers’ rights and changes to corporate governance laws, an industrial strategy and more research and development spending, and reduced energy prices for businesses and households. We promised a new regional development fund, reformed international aid spending, controlled immigration, and a clean Brexit. We wanted a technical education revolution, with new qualifications, institutes of technology and a promise to review tertiary education funding. We said we would reverse the bureaucratic elements of the NHS internal market and train more doctors. We promised domestic violence legislation, better mental health care, and action against various injustices. We pledged new housing, including a new generation of council houses, and more childcare support. We planned new protections for children online, a tougher approach to cyber security, and a legal framework to help Britain become a world leader in digital technologies.
There were plenty of positive stories to tell, but on the whole we did not tell them. Despite the constant worries of the consultants that we might not persuade traditional Labour voters that they could trust the Tories under Theresa’s leadership, they did not want to show our values through policy. When Fiona briefed a story about new workers’ rights, Lynton hit the roof. They wanted to reassure Labour waverers, but were never prepared to say why or how it was safe or appealing to vote for us.
The earlier failure to change fiscal policy also damaged us. In the policy team, we would have loved to announce the end of austerity. We could have gone further in increasing investment in the regional economy. We could have promised proper pay rises for public sector workers. We could have pledged increases in per pupil school spending. Instead, we promised to go on with austerity, and school funding in particular was an issue that hurt us across the country. Our intention to change pensioner benefits – in particular to means-test the winter fuel allowance – was further tough medicine, although, I would argue, still necessary regardless of the fiscal framework.
The biggest problem, however, was the manifesto’s social care policy. Since 2010, as the Government had cut local authority budgets, councils had cut back on social care services. This meant increasing numbers of old people were living in confusion, pain and squalor, and the NHS was suffering as hospitals could not discharge older patients in need of social care that could not be provided. The problem was becoming more acute as the number of older citizens grew. And the consequences were – and remain – ruinous for many families. For residential care, the costs can deplete the patient’s assets – including the value of their home – down to a floor of £23,250 and sometimes even less. Many thousands of people are forced to sell the family home to fund their care.
Our proposals were to include the value of the family home in the means test for domiciliary care – home visits and so on – as well as residential care. This would raise funds while also allowing decisions about care to be made according to the needs of the patient. But we would protect family assets by increasing the floor amount that would be protected from £23,250 to £100,000. And, of course, recovery of the costs from the value of the family home would be deferred until the end of the patient’s lifetime. Nobody would have to sell their home during their own lifetimes to pay for their care.
At first the manifesto landed well. ‘Mainstream May reaches out to Labour heartlands’, said The Times front page.18 ‘May’s manifesto for the mainstream’, declared The Daily Telegraph.19 Commentators described a ‘new Toryism’ and praised even its ‘brave and necessary social care plan’.20
But quickly it all began to unravel. On the day the manifesto launched, a blogger on The Spectator website called the social care policy a ‘dementia tax’.21 Labour seized their opportunity, and Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell – Marxists both – took to the airwaves to defend inherited wealth. In the confusion, members of the CCHQ press team told journalists that the policy was to cap care costs at a maximum of £100,000. In fact, it was to create a floor of £100,000 below which people should not pay for their care costs. MPs and candidates struggled to explain the policy on the doorstep. Theresa herself failed to articulate it well: asked by the media how many people would have to sell their homes to pay for their care, she should have said, ‘unlike now, nobody’. But she
