Kate Fall is either too decent or too discreet to make a really good political diarist. A close friend of David Cameron, his deputy chief of staff and founding member of his so-called Notting Hill set, Fall has a decent claim to being the second-most important woman in the former prime minister’s public life. She was there from the first day of his leadership to the last. Yet the very qualities that placed her outside his door and inside nearly every big strategy meeting are those that diminish this as an insider’s account.
Fall emerges from her airy, enjoyable and fast-paced memoir as a thoroughly likeable and loyal person, which is a pity because if she were less devoted and discreet this would be a much more interesting book. Fall knows where all the bodies are buried, but she really isn’t telling.
Remarkably, for a period that ended less than four years ago, the book itself already feels like a historical document, a revelation of an era now entirely lost. It was, for the Conservative party, a period of optimism, of openness and social liberalism.
Fall acknowledges that the Cameron government sowed most of the seeds of both the 2016 vote for Brexit and its own destruction. A long period of austerity hurt too many people; the leadership seemed too privileged and too disdainful of ordinary people. Even so, the Cameron years already feel like another lifetime. Whatever Cameronism was, there is almost nothing left of it now. The Tories have become almost exactly the party Mr Cameron was determined to prevent them becoming.
Her dedication to the prime minister she served is unstinting, her praise unwavering. It is hard to recall a single moment of criticism. Decisions are brave. He does not duck problems. He has a “ferocious work ethic”, he is “brilliant, intellectually rigorous, pragmatic, decisive and extremely funny”. He does not tolerate sloppiness or laziness. But then all the main players of the era are her friends. George Osborne, the former chancellor, perhaps emerges as the shrewdest strategist. It is he who fights a rearguard action to stop the EU referendum, arguing presciently that it is “all downside”.
Only two figures come off badly and they are the two friends Fall judges to have betrayed the leader’s trust. Michael Gove, who deserts to lead the Brexit campaign, is the main villain, dispatched with contemptuous flicks. He has abandoned “loyalty and decency and become an arch-assassin”. She talks of the “personal disloyalty of a broken friendship”.
Early on he has shown signs. The secrets of the Notting Hill set start to leak only when Gove joins it, she notes. He is a “bit of a Maoist” and also the butt of many of the book’s comic episodes, most notably when he manages to get his car stuck and then crushed by a car lift. Steve Hilton, another early friend and adviser, gets similar treatment. In both cases she notes their feelings of being let down by the leader: Mr Gove at being demoted, and Mr Hilton in finding himself marginalised.
The first half of the book is more a description of life in Downing Street, how it works, personal relationships. The most vivid pen portraits are of Messers Osborne, Gove, Hilton and Fall’s boss, Cameron’s Etonian contemporary Ed Llewellyn. There are nice vignettes of the coalition government era, notably of Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister, depicted as a decent man but a political naïf.
Fall frustrates in what she does not tell us. She was present and involved in most big calls but rarely goes into detail. There are moments when her influence is apparent, but she rarely plays up her role, preferring to chronicle the posturing of the “alpha males”. The most interesting passages are when things go wrong, most obviously in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. The team know they are speeding towards a cliff but cannot figure out a way to stop.
What comes across most clearly is the extraordinarily chummy nature of the inner core. This was a government of pals, who had known or worked with each other for years, which is why disloyalty is the greatest crime.
This, then, is an insider’s record which preserves the omerta of a group of friends who end up running the country. It is all great fun, right up until the moment when it isn’t.
The Robert Shrimsley is the FT’s chief political commentator
The Gatekeeper: Life at the heart of No 10, by Kate Fall, HQ, £16.99
