War between PM and Britain’s top general
BY AUGUST 2013, Cameron was once again trying to coax Obama into military action in the Middle East. The brutal civil war in Syria had ground to a blood- soaked stalemate and President Assad was gassing his own people.
Earlier, Cameron had rejected a secret plan to end the conflict, drawn up by the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir David Richards, outlined in a confidential memo to the PM.
This involved building an opposition army from scratch.
Rebel forces, according to Richards’ plan, would be taken out of Syria to countries such as Jordan, Turkey or Saudi Arabia until they were sufficiently well-trained to return to fight Assad, assisted by Western and Arab air and maritime forces. It would take at least a year.
Richards acknowledges the scheme would have been ‘very expensive’, but says the bill would have been shared with the allies. He was confident it would work. Curiously, Cameron did not reply to the memo. Richards believes the PM just wanted a quick fix.
Increasingly, Richards found himself frozen out of discussions about Syria. Relations with No 10 deteriorated further when he questioned whether Downing Street understood that Syria was not a simple question of the ‘good guys’ versus the ‘bad guys’.
He recalls: ‘I said: “Are you certain we’re backing the right side, Prime Minister?” You could see them all tutting, because they didn’t want to debate it. But someone had to say it. It had got to the point where I felt there was a case for letting Assad win, because at least that would put the population out of their misery.’
But Assad’s chemical weapons strikes against his own people changed everything. Suddenly, Barack Obama was receptive to Cameron’s calls for action.
THE following week, they had three phone conversations, and made plans to bomb the Syrian regime. Obama made it clear he wanted to begin within days. ‘Cameron and Obama were in very close touch,’ confirms a former White House official. ‘They were on the phone for an hour. They went through the operation plan in minute detail . . . the timing, the duration of the strike, the nature of the strike package, the target deck, everything.’
After that, all Cameron had to do was persuade Parliament. But this wasn’t a given: there had already been reports that the majority of Tory MPs would not back deeper involvement in Syria. Even so, the Prime Minister gave Obama no hint that he might struggle to get a Commons majority.
On August 27, Cameron recalled Parliament. After meeting Labour leader Ed Miliband in Downing Street that afternoon, he was confident that he could count on Labour votes. He knew that some Tory MPs were wavering, but he’d seriously misjudged how many were likely to rebel. One Cabinet minister advised Cameron to spend more time squaring military action with his own party.
The Prime Minister, he recalls, told him that ‘Labour were in the bag’ and he thought he’d be able to rustle up enough votes to carry the day. Unfortunately for the PM, Miliband, after consulting Labour MPs, belatedly realised that he couldn’t take his party with him.
No 10 was livid. Cameron shouted down the phone that Miliband was ‘letting down America’. Meanwhile, a Government source briefed journalists that both No 10 and the Foreign Office thought the Labour leader was ‘a f***ing c*** and a copper-bottomed s***’.
The Prime Minister’s position was now desperate. As his whips warned him the numbers simply wouldn’t stack up, he started summoning potential rebels to Downing Street and lobbying them one to one.
A number of MPs who subsequently fell into line were distinctly underwhelmed by Cameron’s pitch. Instead of making the moral case for intervention, they said, he focused on what a catastrophe it would be for the Government to lose the vote.
And it did lose. Thirty Tories, nine Lib Dems, and the majority of Labour MPs voted against military intervention.