Politics On the Edge (Extract)

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1:20Hi there, Alistair. Hope you enjoyed our Restless Politics episodes this week and also the interview with Kathy Achton on Leading. We've got something a little extra special for you. We've got an extract from Rory's new book Politics on the Edge. Or if you're in the United States at the moment, you see a book called How Not to Be a Politician. It's the same thing. You may have heard of politics on the Edge through the exceptional plugging that Rory's been doing on the podcast and elsewhere. Now we've told before about how the best political memoirs are not always entirely honest, but somewhat economical, abic, lecturality, but having read and frankly reread politics on the Edge, Rory's account of the challenges and absurdities of ten years in Parliament really does set it out as it is.

2:06He's filled it with some extraordinary anecdotes and it's a very, very interesting read. I can't recommend it enough. You can get it from any good book shop and if you prefer to listen, as I often do, particularly on long drives, then you can get it in as an audio book as well. So I hope you enjoy this extracts of politics on the Edge, where Rory takes us through the first time he's promoted from the backpensions and meets his new boss, One Liz Truss.

2:33In the spring of 2015, Cameron Summitus took a retreat in a conference hotel, in his constituency in Oxfordshire. It was the parliamentary recess. Some MPs chose to stay away, but most of us did what we were told and turned up. We rambled into the lecture hall bearing paper coffee cups and paper plates of Danish pastries and took our place in cinema seats. MPs who had only seen in dark suits and white shirts and blue ties were experimenting with the idea of casual clothes. One had a pair of pressed blue jeans, another a pink polo shirt, but only the prime ministers in a circle or sneakers. George Osborne came on the stage.

3:21He introduced Jim Messina, a thin man with an underpowered voice. He said that Messina had just won the second election for Barack Obama through his use of Facebook and Twitter, and that he had been hired to win the same victory for us. The party we were told had raised tens of millions of pounds for our new campaign, buying consumer data and building a new software platform. We were to be the first generation of British politicians to enter the world of big data, AI and social media. Messina's data scientists would micro target exactly the right supporters in the key target constituencies with the most efficient allocation of money and resources and persuade them to vote through their phones, the older MPs glanced at their phones as though unsure whether they had turned them off.

4:13In March 2015 Cameron called the election and I returned for six weeks of constituency campaigning. Every few months over the five years, I and other backbenchers have been dragged into presentations on internal opinion polls, which were optimistically at odds with the national polling. But even the most loyal conservative posters didn't suggest that we could win an overall majority. That Cameron insisted bitterly would only have been possible by reducing the number of MPs and changing the boundaries, and we had lost that chance in the House of Lords rebellion. Instead, the general consensus was that both Labour and Conservatives would fall short of an overall majority, and we would have to reform another coalition with the Lib Dems.

5:05I was sent down to campaign in Cheltenham, far from my own seat. The candidate Alex Chalk was busy with the party chairman Grant Shaps, who had emerged in shirt sleeves with a gleaming smile from a battle bus packed with very young and overly anxious would -VMPs in tight t -shirts. I was sent to Canva's some backstreet with a local counsellor. Our sheet didn't direct us to every door, but instead to a seemingly random collection of doors in every street. Number 5 was followed by number 17. This the counsellor explained came from the consumer shopping data, which the party had bought from the big supermarkets and other retailers.

5:51Our new software used this data to predict which numbers in the street were likely to vote conservative. How does that work? Well, I suppose it's something like, if we know they bought Stiltson, perhaps, as opposed to Edamame at Tesco's, they're more likely to vote conservative. But Cheddar, I was not sure if he was joking. Still debating politically indicative dairy products, we turned up another path. If someone answered the door, the counsellor explained, we were to interview them about policy and write down their mobile phone number. Someone else would then collect our canvas sheets and enter the data in a computer.

6:33An algorithm would compare this to other data sets, adjust its parameters, and generate an ever more accurate real -time picture, not only of how each individual would vote, but which issues in particular would motivate them on election day, generating tailored messages with just the right claims on the NHS or education or defence and ping them to phones. This was apparently how Obama had won his election. Except the first door to which the computer directed us had a Labour poster in its window, the next target had been rented out as a student squat. We passed a house which the counsellor said meriously contained conservative voters, but which the software had failed to identify.

7:18It had taken me nine hours to get to Cheltenham from Cumbria. In three hours of campaigning, we found only one potential conservative voter. We reported this name to the campaign headquarters, now filled with Grant Shaps' young activists, apparently readying for the post -battle bus party. Elsewhere colleagues were gloomy. Campaining back in Cumbria, I began to notice that if a house was filled with books, the occupants would not be voting conservative. I was exchanging texts with many MPs. Each assumed that we would fail to win a majority because we had failed to be the kind of party which we each separately imagined.

8:02I, for example, felt that we had seemed too vindictive in our spending reductions, lamentable in our lack of support for the civil service in the BBC, had not sufficiently supported rural communities or delivered on the promise of the big society, and had conducted ourselves without dignity. Quasi Quoting, who was still a backbench MP, told me the problem was that we were not right -wing enough. He felt his voters were more sympathetic to the Euro -Skeptic Party UKIP, which had taken 25 % of the vote in the 2014 European elections. He had applauded Cameron for refusing to approve a European bailout for Greece.

8:44Cameron's refusal horrified me, and he was pleased that Cameron had promised to hold a referendum on Europe. But Quasi felt we had squandered the right -wing voter base. He was immersed in the history of local constituency elections, and he felt the national polls concealed how weak our position was at an individual constituency level. How many of the people who you are canvassing in Cumbria, a genuinely enthusiastic about Cameron? Do you really think we will be able to hold a marginal, like Carlisle? I agreed. I had not felt much enthusiasm for Cameron in Carlisle. Perhaps Quasi and I found it difficult to believe in our government because it had given neither of us a job, but most journalists and perhaps Cameron himself also agreed that we could not win a majority, and therefore would not be held to the promise of a referendum on Europe.

9:39The Lib Dems would throw the referendum out in the coalition agreement. Only my friend John Hat predicted that we would win. He had compiled a list of 232 errors of judgment made by David Cameron during his time in office, from economic policy to his handling of Rupert Murdoch, and said that in any normal situation we deserved to be crushed, but he said that Cameron's offer to hold a referendum on Europe would be enough to win the election. We needed to put nothing else on our leaflets. None of this matched what we were told by the internal posters, who assured us that Europe was number 15 in the public's list of priorities.

10:23I guarantee and will give you an omniscient bet that the posters are wrong on that, said Hat. When the results came in, I had won a record majority. We increased the vote across Cumbria and indeed across the country. Our Lib Dem coalition partners were wiped out, dropping from 57 seats to 8. Labour lost every seat in Scotland to the Scottish Nationalists, ending a century of domination in the North. The old two and a half party system seemed to be over. How much of this was due to Jim Messina and his digital campaign and how much to the promise of a Brexit referendum was unclear. Each MP attributed our success to our own ability, charisma and dedication to our seat.

11:13But political scientists insisted that it had been a national swing, and the character of the individual MP made very little difference to the vote. Cameron read this victory as a firm endorsement of his particular style of politics. And it emboldened him to feel he could win the Brexit referendum, just as he had won the Scottish referendum and the election. First however, he was faced with filling empty Lib Dem seats in his government. He therefore set out to, in his words, harvest the crop of talent from the seeds sewn over the past decade or more. I of course hoped he would promote me and some of my friends.

11:59Harness from among the back bench MPs, Damian Heinz's toughness, calmness and modesty. Nadim Zahawiz practical, if piratical, management skills. Gavin Barwell's patient eye for the incongruous. Charlotte Leslie's empathy. But these were not the people who Cameron had been fast tracking for the last five years to the cabinet, or whom he meant when he said he was building a modern, compassionate, conservative party and ending the idea that the Tories aren't open to talent, to women, to minorities. He meant nine people in particular. Not people on whose advice he relied, or whose judgment he particularly trusted.

12:42For that, he still relied on his inner circle and his old etonians. Not people who spoke particularly well in the House of Commons. Some did, some didn't. Not people with particular strengths and running departments. Some of them were competent. Others incurious, uncritical and inept. He meant the team players. Or at least so it appeared to my genre style. I divide the world, Cameron like to say, team players and wankers. Don't be a wanker. A team player was someone who paraded the party line with further, never rebelled and was never abashed. His younger promotions, Pretty Patel, Liz Truss and Matt Hancock, took this to a vertigo inducing extreme.

13:33The older women, such as Amber Radden and Annasubri with adult children and long careers before Parliament, were blunter, even funny about some issues in private. But in public, all these high fliers from my intake were fanatically supportive of David Cameron. Did he worry about what they really believed about him, or the European Union? Did he speculate on how willing they would be, if one of his rivals, such as Boris Johnson, took over, to shift their allegiance, champion a completely different position and denied that any contradiction had occurred? Did he ask himself whether the younger ones would be more idealistic and loyal to Cameron conservatism, or whether the older ones would prove more steady?

14:18Was he worried about who exactly Pretty Patel or Liz Truss were? How well they governed, or what exactly they believed? I doubted it. But by promoting these people consistently, Cameron had created the future leadership candidates for the Conservative Party, and probably made at least one of them a future Prime Minister. I'd been encouraged to keep my phone on in case Downing Street called with a promotion. I did so for three nights, was work on by calls from the States and Afghanistan, and finally, increasingly certain that I would not be promoted, turned it off. I work at 820 on a Tuesday morning to find four missed calls from Cameron's chief of staff and texts.

15:02Where are you? Call me. I called. So sorry, my phone was off. Not a very good time to keep your phone off, is it? The Prime Minister wants to see you in 20 minutes. I put on a white shirt, dark blue suit, and sober spotted tie. At South Kent Station, I picked up a cappuccino. A British diplomat who I knew from Iraq was on the district line platform, and wished me luck. Transfiring the paper cup to shake a hand, I squeezed too hard on the cup, and cappuccino foam exploded down the right breast of my navy suit and my right trouser leg. She convinced me that I didn't have the time to go home to change.

15:41I dabbed it with a thin, disintegrating napkin. As I walked through the gates into Downing Street, the flashes exploded from the camera men, and I strode past with one hand raised my lip jutting out like Mussolini's, and my body angled towards the wall in the hope of concealing the shreds of paper and beige foam on the crotch of my damp suit. For the first time, the door of number 10 was opened before I reached it by the policeman who had been watching me on a camera. I sat in a waiting room, officials whom I knew walked past smiling congratulations. After five years of waiting for my first job, I was not sure what Cameron would choose to use me for.

16:26Perhaps because of the work I'd done on broadband, a job on digital infrastructure. Or perhaps having run a heritage charity, I would be appointed to the Ministry of Culture, big society minister, or maybe as a Scots and a Unionist campaigner I would be put in the Scottish office. Colleagues who had seen on Twitter that I'd been called to Downing Street began to text advice. They said that Cameron would try to promote me because he wanted me inside the tent, not attacking him from the outside. I should not undervalue my position. I should refuse anything that wasn't a senior job and remain as chair of the Defence Committee.

17:05The chair of the Culture Committee had been put directly into the cabinet. Finally I was called into the cabinet room. I had never seen it before. A dining table more than 30 feet long, laid with green bays around the length of the room, lined with 30 red leather chairs. The walls were a pale yellow and mostly bare. Two glass bookcases on my right held Almanacs and registers. There were a couple of small old fashioned clocks. Look like the dining room of the 1970s country house hotel. David Cameron sat at one end of the table facing the door, with his chief of staff beside him. Hello Rory, he said, I understand you want a chance to do something different.

17:51He sounded a little distracted. I would like you to be, he said, glancing down, parliamentary undersecretary and the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs dealing with issues like farming. Actually, probably more with the environment, said the chief of staff. It was the most junior position in perhaps the most junior department in government. But my chance had come to stop simply being a commentator, get off the back benches and start governing. I thanked him warmly. David Cameron made a non -commental noise. I glanced at the chief of staff wondering if there would be a second to discuss what was expected of me in this role.

18:35But he raised his eyebrows and nodded towards the door. So I thanked the Prime Minister again, got to my feet and walked out, with no indication of why he had appointed me or what he wanted me to do. Outside the door of number 10, a black government car was waiting. Journalists were waving and shouting questions. The car shielded my stained trousers from the cameras. We drove down Whitehall round the awkwardly -sized bronze fetishes of dead politicians, each out of scale with its neighbour. And then south along the Thames to a granite block carved with giant images of men with haunted faces in scientific coats holding laboratory instruments.

19:19This, the driver said, was the former headquarters of Imperial Chemical Industries, ICI. The manufacturer of insecticides fertilizers, explosives and poison gas weapons known for its exploding factories and chemical spills. Now it was Defra. The Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs charged with regulating insecticides and chemical spills. Two men and three women were waiting on the steps. They said, welcome, Minister, and guided me past the staircase glittering with chrome balustrades to an elevator with walls of blue -art decoglass and burnished steel marked ministers only. We emerged in a tight flock onto a bordering corridor lined with black and white pictures of former ministers of agriculture.

20:13On the facing wall was a set of posters celebrating Britain's greatness. Wallis and Gromit appeared under the headline, Creativity is Great, another poster, innovation is great, depicted a dark robotic hand that seemed to represent Britain as Darth Vader reaching for the throat of the world. I was introduced to two women whose tasks included serving afternoon tea to ministers. Passing through an outer office, apparently for my private secretaries, and a waiting room with leather sofas and an 18th century landscape on the walls, I arrived at my new inner office. Long windows showed sunlight on the stems and fresh green leaves on the plain trees on the embankment.

21:02Across the river, I could see the red brick castle of the Archbishop's palace. Promethly displayed on the long dining table was a cherry red lead -lined briefcase packed with manila folders. On its front was a royal cipher and the gold title, Parliamentary Undersecretary for the Environment and Rural Affairs. This was my red box. Whether the lead lining was there to sink the secret papers or protect me from a bullet was unclear. But its design was identical to the one used by Gladstone, and at £1 ,000 a box, it served, I was told, to sustain the British traditional craft industry. Three women, Joe Liz and Susie, and one man, Tom, asked if they could sit down at the table.

21:51We are your private office, Minister. They said, in the turn of a concierge team at an expensive hotel. They explained that the department consisted of three ministers. Liz Truss was the Secretary of State and my boss. The Minister of State, the second most senior minister, had been given the portfolio for food which meant farming. I, as the Parliamentary Undersecretary had been allocated the Environment and Rural Affairs brief. Would you like a coffee, Minister? Given that the last one was on my trousers, I gratefully accept it. Joe got up from the table in quest of a cappuccino from Prett. Liz pushed over my diary for the next two weeks.

22:34Susie handed me one of the red briefing folders also marked with a gold royal cipher. Its neat sections each marked by a coloured label had just been pulled together for a minister of whose identity they had been completely unaware 20 minutes earlier. I glimpsed in Tom's hand what seemed to be my speeches from hand side. Presumably he had been reading them in the hope of getting some clues on my beliefs. The folder told me that I was now responsible for the nation's forestry, all the rivers, the national parks, the country's nature and biodiversity, flooding, chemicals, air quality, billions of pounds of annual environmental payments and much more.

23:16I felt an excitement I had not felt since establishing Turquoise Mountain in Kabul ten years earlier. I paused looking at the four junior officials who formed my inner team, each with neat clothes, neat smiles and even neat her files as crisp as the lime wood carving on the walls. They were all I guess in their 20s. Tom looked as though he'd only just left university. The big question I said is what should we change? How will we make the world a better place? They didn't reply. Not me, all of us together. What should we do? Still, they didn't reply. I requested a flip chart and Joe returned quickly with one, whose three unsteady white metal legs seemed more suitable to an industrial estate in Slau than the art deco office.

24:12Asking them to call out my various roles, I began recording in different colors my responsibilities. I wrote environmental payments and flood money, brackets, three billion pounds a year, closed brackets, forestry brackets, 150 ,000 acres, closed brackets and wrote action question mark next to each. I proposed that I should make an immediate visit to the headquarters of the environment agency and asked them to arrange an emergency flood exercise for I fear that a flood might come before I knew what I was doing. I requested round tables on chemicals, air quality and international conservation. I sketched out a job description so that I would know what exactly to request in my first meeting with the Secretary of State.

25:01They remained silent. I stopped. Of course, I'm sorry, I don't have any idea what I'm talking about. I've only been here 15 minutes. You're the experts. Come on, argue back. Tell me I'm talking nonsense. We'll change things together. What would you like to change? Now the senior of the three spoke in a tone that oozed restrained competence. We will definitely think about that minister and come back to you. I took a moment, stretched and walked to the other end of the vast office. I had heard that it was labor who had spent millions of pounds restoring this building right down to the glass mosaic in the ministerial lift.

25:47Now it seemed that the conservatives wanted to sell it for apartments. I opened a cupboard. It contained glasses and half empty bottles of liquor to Keela and apparel. I turned and grinned at the team. Legacy of a labor minister. They smiled politely back. I opened the drawer of the elaborately carved Edwardian desk which sat in a scalloped alcove. It was a party from a comb. Whose comb is this? Our apologies minister, we should have removed it. Well whose comb was it? Minister Rodgerson's minister. Who? Dan Rodgerson, your predecessor. I had to open Google on my phone to remind myself who he had been.

26:36I was reminded of a quiet man younger than me who had spent an afternoon in Cumbria listening to me pitch different ways in which this department could invest more in pen -ruth and the border. He had seemed a little confused by my approach and we had received no investment. What is he doing now? We are not sure minister. Is he no longer a minister? He's no longer an MP. Returning to Wikipedia, I discovered to my embarrassment that Dan, who I had assumed was an obscure conservative colleague on the front benches elected on some earlier intake, had in fact been a Liberal Democrat, who had been given the ministerial role as part of the coalition agreement and having run the environment and rural affairs portfolio for a year and a half had lost his seat to the conservative candidate.

27:26Could you at least tell me what Dan Rodgerson was trying to achieve before he left? Yes minister, we will prepare a note. I asked for his mobile number. They said they would try to get it but they didn't sound confident. A month earlier they had been anticipating every nuance of minister Rodgerson's diary, supporting him on shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But it was already clear that there would be no pretence of a handover. No explanation of my predecessor's strategy and uncompleted initiatives. The arrival of a new minister was Groundhog Day. Dan Rodgerson was not a ghost haunting my office.

28:08He was an absence whose former existence was suggested only by the Black Plastic Com. I was beginning to question whether ministers had any significance or presence at all when my friend the conservative MP Richard Benyon knocked on the door. Richard Dan Rodgerson's predecessor was 54 and looked 20 years younger with an open handsome face. I asked the private office to leave and Richard helped me work steadily through the portfolio. He had ingenious ideas about canals and shrewd suggestions about my new team. The tea ladies who it seemed worshipped him kept us nourished with cake, served on a set of bone china, apparently salvaged from some even grander ministerial office.

28:57I was astonished that Cameron had demoted someone so committed and knowledgeable about his brief. But Richard would not join me in criticising Cameron. He seemed to view every conservative leader with an adjutance loyalty, never presuming to judge whether the ex interestities of his commanding officer reflected wisdom or shell shock. Then I was summoned to meet my new secretary of state. I thanked Richard and walked down the corridor lined with photographs and posters to her office, where I was told that she was in a meeting and that I had to wait with her secretaries. After what seemed a long time, her in a door swung open, Liz Truss stood very close to me in the doorway blocking my way.