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Yet the advantages of a deeper connection were undeniable. Thousands of Chinese students and tourists flocked to Britain each year. Chinese people loved our history and culture. With a burgeoning Chinese middle class, there was a massive potential market there, and although Labour had made some inroads, it remained largely untapped.
So, China: opportunity or risk? The coalition was split. Nick had been campaigning on the human-rights issues for years. And William was sceptical about the Communist Party’s intentions. He wrote me a letter during our first month in office with a stark warning about China ‘free-riding on wider global public goods’ – obstructing international action if it conflicted with its own domestic imperatives.
My stance – and George’s – was more pragmatic. It wasn’t, of course, that I didn’t care about human rights, or that I trusted a party which appointed one ‘paramount leader’ every five years. It was just that I thought there was a longer game to play, and a better way of getting what we wanted.
Yes, our ambition was largely economic, but an essential outcome of that economic partnership would be the greater political leverage it would give us. In other words, the trust that we could build from doing business together could lead to trust across a whole range of areas.
Naturally, we would always be vigilant when it came to China. We were hard-headed about the threat it posed, instructing our security services to map and counter the Chinese threat. Only by understanding and guarding against that could we trade with the country.
This would be the best, the safest, way to bring China into the rules-based international system – through rules on trade, but also rules on climate change, terrorism and human rights. The more it was part of the UN, the WTO, the G20, the more cooperative our relationship would be. We could influence its views on everything from climate change to Burma to North Korea. Which was vital – China would be a linchpin in all these matters.
On my first visit to China as prime minister in November 2010, with four cabinet ministers and forty-three business leaders, I knew I’d have to walk a tightrope, on the one hand trying to strike trade deals and showcase what we had to offer investors, and on the other raising issues around human rights and democracy.
Nothing was going to stop the Chinese in their pursuit of growth – getting people out of the countryside into the cities, into employment and out of poverty. If you were useful – if you could supply inward investment, exports and scientific knowledge, as we could – then you were considered a partner. ‘Transactional’ is the FCO jargon for that sort of relationship.
But there was still a tightrope to walk. So, when I went to Beijing University, I decided to make a more wide-ranging speech, focusing on the importance of democracy and the rule of law. Given that you can be locked up in China for so much as criticising the socialist state, going further than most Western leaders in promoting democracy would, I reasoned, more than offset any perceived obsequiousness in our economic dealings.
I didn’t quite stir a revolution. But I did provoke something when I said: ‘The rise in economic freedom in China in recent years has been hugely beneficial to China and to the world. I hope that in time this will lead to a greater political opening.’ The first question from a student after my speech was about what advice I’d give to the Communist Party in China in an age when more countries were having plural politics. An amazing noise went around the room, half admiration and half shock. I gave a measured answer about our countries having two very different systems. But as I looked around at the sea of faces I thought: is this system really going to last? My conclusion was that, in its current form, it couldn’t. After all, surely this was now a consumer society in which people had increasing amounts of choice over their lives. How could the ruling party frustrate that when it came to politics?
While my fundamental view hasn’t altered – change, in some form, will come – multiple visits to China have led me to a more nuanced view. The primacy given by both government and people to economic growth. The fierce sense of pride and exceptionalism. The attention given by the nation’s rulers to emerging trends and problems across the country. All these things mean that China’s path to greater pluralism may be a very long one, with a different destination to our own.
Given that so many other countries were trying to align themselves economically with China, this incident, and the unfortunate poppy set-to, which happened on the same visit, weren’t exactly welcome. A three-day visit to the UK by Li Keqiang, who was heavily tipped to replace Wen Jiabao as premier, gave us a chance to up our game. Li, who received red-carpet treatment, made it clear that some of my comments had not been welcome. But despite that we would make real inroads.
Finally, there is an agenda I really wish I had never started. That was the British bid to host the 2018 World Cup.
Britain had a strong case: the best stadia, the most enthusiastic supporters, club teams that are followed across the world, and a football-mad culture. We had also learned a lot from our successful bid for the 2012 Olympics.
The biggest barrier to bringing the tournament home for the first time since 1966 was the notorious world football governing body, FIFA, and its susceptibility to corruption. The bid also pitched us against Russia, a country with a government quite prepared to do whatever it took to win.
We threw everything into beating Russia – and Belgium and the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain – to host the 2018 Cup. I had the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, to No. 10. He even got to hold Florence – a privilege reserved for presidents and monarchs, I joked at the time. Looking back, knowing what I know now, it makes me wince.
Then, in December 2010, I spent three days in Zürich, where the bidding process was taking place for both the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. With Prince William and David Beckham by my side, my confidence grew. We had the best bid – and a dream team to bring it home.
The process was rather like speed dating, with an allotted amount of time with each voting nation’s representatives to try to persuade them to back our bid. The three of us pleaded with people from Cyprus to Paraguay. America’s representative, a man called Chuck Blazer, was so enormous that as he got up to leave, his chair went with him.
The corrupt undertones were all there, but, typically British, we gave it our best and got through it with jokes. Vladimir Putin’s approach was classic. He suddenly cancelled his appearance, claiming that the whole competition was riddled with corruption.
The moment of our presentation approached, and my role was to kick it off with a short, off-the-cuff speech. I confessed to Prince William that I was nervous. He told me not to be – and just to imagine Chuck Blazer naked.
The three of us stood up and gave our pitch. We were followed by a video accompanied by Elbow’s ‘One Day Like This’. It was stirring stuff, and we got a strong ovation.
Our confidence grew. Six nations promised that they would vote for us in the first round: South Korea, Trinidad and Tobago, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, USA and England.
How many votes did we end up with? Two.
Russia, whose bid was fraught with problems including racism, won the chance to host the 2018 World Cup. Forty-degree Qatar, hardly a footballing hub, got 2022. Putin didn’t need to come. The fish had been bought and sold before we’d even got to the marketplace.
David Beckham was upset and angry. ‘I don’t mind people lying to me, but not to my prime minister and future king,’ he said. Blatter said we were just ‘bad losers’.
In the years that followed, a criminal investigation into the way the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups were chosen took place. Nine of the twenty-two members of the FIFA Executive Committee who awarded them have been punished, indicted or died before facing charges, including Chuck Blazer, who admitted fraud, money laundering and taking bribes on the 1998 and 2010 World Cups. For seventeen years Sepp Blatter presided over an organisation riddled with corruption. He has been banned from football for six years, and his plaque removed from FIFA headquarters.
One issue that proved to be more prevalent than I had expected before I became prime minister was corruption. I kept on seeing it for myself: from Omar al-Bashir’s refugee camps in Sudan to Blatter’s boardroom in Zürich. Those same forces that had denied Britain the World Cup – bribery, lack of transparency, collusion, fraud – were depriving people around the world of safer, healthier, wealthier lives.
At international summits we focused on everything – security, poverty, growth, aid, the environment. But we seldom said a word about one of the biggest drivers of these things: corruption. I resolved to spend my time in government – and after it – trying to change that.
14
Afghanistan and the Armed Forces
When I took office there were more than 10,000 British troops in Afghanistan, engaged in a conflict that had lasted nearly a decade. That made me the first prime minister to come to power from a different party when the country was at war since 1951 – the year Churchill replaced Attlee while British troops were fighting in Korea.
I spent more time on Afghanistan – visiting, reading, discussing, deliberating, and yes, worrying – than on any other issue. The burden weighed heavily upon me every single day until the final British combat soldier left Camp Bastion in 2014. I still care deeply about Afghanistan’s future today. And I will always remember the families of the fallen, and those living with life-changing injuries because of their service.
Many leaders have written about what it’s like to send brave men and women into battle. My reflections are about inheriting that responsibility and handling a conflict whose aim had become ambiguous and whose unpopularity was growing.
I supported the decision to send troops to help rebels overturn the Taliban government in 2001. The ‘invasion’ of Afghanistan was justified. The brutal Taliban regime, which controlled 90 per cent of the country, was harbouring al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11. It was continuing to train jihadists and plot attacks against the West. When asked to expel Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, it had refused. The US had no sensible choice but to act. And we were right to support it. As a young backbencher, on the day after the invasion I said in the House of Commons that our actions were ‘every bit as justified as the fight against Nazism in the 1940s’.
By 2005, when I became Conservative leader, there was a growing sense that while Iraq might be the ‘wrong war’, as it had little to do with tackling Islamist extremism and might in fact be encouraging it, Afghanistan was the ‘right war’. We were at least trying to deal with one of the principal sources of the problem, and responding to a direct attack.
Come 2010, my message matched what I had said in the House of Commons almost a decade before. Our troops were combatting terrorism, with the Taliban beaten back. They were defending our security, with plots no longer coming directly out of Afghanistan (although there was still more to be done to address the threat from ungoverned parts of neighbouring Pakistan).
Sadly, like whack-a-mole, the scourge of Islamist extremism and its promotion of terror would rear its head elsewhere. Every broken or fragile state was a potential incubator, and the Afghanistan–Pakistan border was the most virulent region of all. But in tackling it there, we were tackling the motherlode.
In any case, it is true to say that Britain is safer as a result of the hard work and bloody sacrifice of our troops in Afghanistan.
That’s why the view of our intelligence experts in 2010 was clear: what we were doing remained justified. The most significant security threat to the United Kingdom remained al-Qaeda. If we left Afghanistan precipitately, it – and its training camps – could return.
But our action came at a grave cost. We were taking casualties almost every day. And, like the vast, sandy plains we were fighting over, the war seemed to have no end in sight.
What helped me now I was PM was that I’d visited Afghanistan more than any other country. I knew the drill: picking up a Hercules turboprop plane or a C17 transport jet in the Gulf to take us to Camp Bastion or the capital, Kabul. Then travelling onwards in the Americans’ Black Hawk helicopters or our own Chinooks, where I would sit upfront in the ‘jump seat’ just behind the pilots; landing to see the small fortified Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) our troops were defending, often against ferocious attack.
I knew the landscape: the way the totally dry desert merged into the lush green Helmand River valley, the beautiful blue-green water fertilising the land; the mud-brick houses that told of a deeply conservative society that hadn’t really changed for decades, even centuries.
I had seen some of the worst trouble spots, visiting the Helmandi town of Sangin in 2008 with William Hague. As we sat being briefed on the roof of the district centre under the fierce sun we could hear the crackle of small-arms fire. A local checkpoint was under attack. There was the quietest rush of air as a stray bullet passed overhead. The commanding officer gently ushered us under cover, muttering about the dangers of sunburn. Wonderfully British.
I had got to know a lot of the personnel, too. Hugh Powell, a top-rate civil servant, had served as the head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team in the capital of Helmand, Lashkar Gah, as well as being the senior Brit coordinating the UK counter-insurgency in the south of the country. One time we had breakfast together wearing our helmets because of an imminent security threat. Another, we tried on the full kit, body armour and radio of a lance corporal, jogging with a rifle around the yard of an FOB in the forty-degree heat.
When I first visited Bastion I climbed the air-traffic control tower and looked over a small camp of tents. Since then it had grown to an area the size of Reading, complete with a runway, a water-bottling plant, a medical facility as sophisticated as any district general hospital – and a KFC. Many of the pilots were from RAF Brize Norton in my constituency, and would talk candidly to me about life at the base. I heard about the problems first hand, from frustration at the lack of contact time with home to the potentially fatal shortage of helicopters and delays in getting new body armour.
Sometimes we would stay in Kandahar, the massive, mostly US, airbase covering the whole of southern Afghanistan. It was home to many of our fighter and helicopter pilots and our remarkable troops. Two miles long and right next to the city that is in some ways the spiritual home of the Taliban, it was subject to the occasional rocket attack and repeated ambushes.
I had also seen what ordinary life was like for Afghan people. I’ll never forget watching children flying kites across the river from where we were staying, or visiting a school funded by the UK’s Department for International Development.
I knew the lingo: a mixture of military-speak and banter. The heat: like a blazing fire that hits you the minute you step off the aircraft, made worse by the altitude that can leave you exhausted. The sand: it got everywhere; you’d come home with it still up your nose. The sounds at night: the constant coming and going of helicopters, the alarms when there was a threat of attack, and the endless sound of the diesel generators.
I even grew used to the tight, corkscrew take-offs and landings designed to evade rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire from the Taliban on the ground. Fortunately, I rarely had to contemplate the threat of a direct attack. My only brief taste of one was when our two helicopters were leaving the relative safety of Camp Bastion for a military outpost in the middle of Helmand. I was seated in the body of the second Chinook, looking out of the back, where the ramp is always slightly ajar, at the mountainous expanse below. Suddenly the helicopter turned back. There was good intelligence that the Taliban knew that someone senior would be coming in by helicopter.
That feeling – of being in the crosshairs of the enemy – is what our troops lived with every day. I don’t know how they did it.
I had a constant reminder of the tragic reality behind the growing death toll when I wrote by hand to bereaved families. So often were we losing men and women at the start of my premiership that I’d have one to write every few days. It was a task I would carry out at the kitchen table in the flat or in my study at Chequers. I would commend the soldier for their bravery and, carefully reading the citations made by their comrades about their service, I would take points from them. I would also use some of my own experience – particularly to parents – about losing a child. I tended to say that while there was nothing anyone could say to lessen the pain and grief, I knew that over time at least some of the clouds would part, and some of the happier memories from the past would come through. I would try to explain what we were doing in Afghanistan. It was a country far away, but the struggle against Islamist extremism and terror was something that affected us back at home.
It was this, instead of any overarching ideology, which would inform the decisions I would take. My approach was hard-headed and pragmatic. I tried to make the choices that would best guarantee the stability of Afghanistan, the security of our country and the safety of our troops.
As prime minister for less than a third of that thirteen-year war, I took some of its defining steps. There were three key things that I thought necessitated them.
The first was that the overall goal of our intervention had veered too much towards nation-building – ‘creating a Denmark in the desert’, as some put it – whereas we should be aiming for Pakistan-lite. We needed realism. A failing state would be better than a failed state. As I put it during that first visit to Afghanistan as prime minister: ‘We are not here to build the perfect society, we are here to stop the re-establishment of training camps.’
The second thing we needed was time to build up a sufficient Afghan National Security Force and government so they could handle the civil war without our help. (In fact, the size of the ANSF – army plus police – doubled between 2009 and 2012, making it strong enough to manage the fighting largely without NATO from 2015.)
The third thing was the need for a deadline. I could see the case against this. The Taliban could just wait for us to leave. But the counter-arguments appeared more compelling. Our military high command seemed to have settled on the idea of being in Afghanistan almost indefinitely. The Afghans had become far too reliant on our presence. And as we lost troops, public consent was dwindling. A date would force everyone’s hand to reach a satisfactory and stable position before support at home disappeared altogether.
One of the early defining steps I took was recommitting Britain to the war, by making sure Afghanistan was our number-one security priority. On my first full day in Downing Street, I convened the new NSC. We were a country at war, I told the assembled ministers, and this would be our war cabinet. We wouldn’t just be setting the strategy and leaving the heads of the army, navy and air force to fill in the gaps. We would seek to shape events more directly and take urgent action. We would have monthly published reports on progress and quarterly statements – by a cabinet minister – to Parliament. This would not become a forgotten war. We started with a boost for the troops, doubling the operational allowance they were paid while on tour.
I was clear where action was needed most urgently: Sangin. President Obama had rightly ordered a ‘surge’ in the number of US forces in 2009, increasing them from 30,000 to 90,000. Britain meanwhile had committed to an increase from 9,000 to 9,500 troops in Helmand, where we had taken over security in 2006.
I didn’t object to the increase; I objected to how thinly spread we would end up being in comparison to the Americans. The advice was that our numbers would be sufficient. But I commissioned some figures that revealed that while the US would now have up to twenty-five soldiers per thousand members of the Afghan population, we would have just sixteen.
Sangin demonstrated this lopsided deployment. This small town is where we sustained nearly a quarter of all our losses during the conflict. I knew that we had to match America’s densities of troops. But we had carried more than our share of the burden – we made up only a tenth of the fighting force in Afghanistan, but suffered a third of the casualties – so the option of increasing UK troop numbers seemed wrong. Taken together, this meant getting out of Sangin. I overruled the advice and secured agreement for the withdrawal.
The US Marine commander who took overall responsibility for Helmand was a splendid man called Brigadier General Larry Nicholson. As if marching straight out of Central Casting, he crushed the bones of my right hand with his handshake and declared that he had come straight from Fallujah – one of the toughest battles in Iraq – and was ready to take the fight to the Taliban. He proceeded to use a dried opium-poppy stick to point at the map on the wall and run through his plans. He recognised that our decision was a reasonable one, and US forces took over what remained one of the toughest jobs in the country.
Partly because of this redeployment, our casualty numbers fell dramatically. In 2010, 103 British troops were killed. In 2011 and 2012, that fell to forty-six and forty-four respectively. For the final three years we were in Afghanistan, the British death toll dropped to single figures each year.
The move also improved our performance in the rest of Helmand. But action wasn’t just needed in adjusting the force; it was needed on the state of our equipment, which had become something approaching a national scandal. I knew from my previous visits the key improvements needed: more helicopters, faster casualty evacuation, more rapid improvements in body armour. And, above all, better-protected vehicles.
The Taliban’s weapon of choice was the improvised explosive device (IED), which was becoming ever more sophisticated. Every time we increased the armour on our vehicles, they would find a new way of burying more explosives. Every time we developed a metal detector with more sensitive scanners, they would find a way of using fewer metallic components. IEDs became the primary instrument for killing and maiming not just our troops, but local people, including children. Our forces’ ageing Snatch Land Rovers were no match for these roadside bombs. To be fair to my predecessor, plans were in place for improvements, but I did everything I could to add to them and speed up their delivery.
The action we took in the NSC – including expanding a new system that bypassed bureaucracy and delivered equipment more quickly – aimed to give our forces what they needed. After a couple of years, no one raised concerns with me about poor vehicles or a shortage of helicopters. Some even said to me that in some regards our equipment was superior to that used by US troops.
The biggest decision, though, would be about our long-term involvement in Afghanistan. After nine years of the conflict – and four bloody years in Helmand – people were rightly asking: when will our work be completed? And when will our troops come home?
To answer those questions, we needed to be far more precise about exactly what it was we were trying to achieve. And while some elements of that nation-building would be important – getting children into school, improving healthcare, constructing infrastructure – we had to show common sense and keep a grip on what was possible.